


Emergency

by PenNameArtist



Series: Burning Rose (AKA The Burn'verse) [1]
Category: Planes (Movies)
Genre: Action, Angst, Blade gets mauled by the world, Drama, Dreams, Dusty copes with everything at once, Emotional Rollercoaster, Gen, Ghosts, Horror, I am a terrible person, M/M, Maru is shaking his head in woe, Murder, Mystery, Self-Harm, Suicide, Suspense, The past coming back to bite you in the aft, Thriller, Windlifter is best support, overcoming the past
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:13:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 23
Words: 41,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22709044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PenNameArtist/pseuds/PenNameArtist
Summary: 'It began innocently enough, Blade sharing his past of joining Piston Peak - and how it almost didn't happen - until something caught the team VERY off guard. Since the most recent "incident", things went from 'crazy' to 'weird AND crazy': Seeing ghosts, dreams of memories from another life, all while the ugly head of an unsolved murder looms in the air like fog...and Dusty was about to get wrapped up in a lot more than a fire season this year.'WARNING:Graphic depictions of violence, fair use of swearing, character deaths and trauma, self-harm and suicide depictions, and convoluted, off-the-rails storytelling by yours truly (a complete psychopath).
Relationships: Blade Ranger/Windlifter, Dusty Crophopper/Blade Ranger, Dusty Crophopper/Windlifter, Nick Loopin' Lopez/Blade Ranger
Series: Burning Rose (AKA The Burn'verse) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2042263
Comments: 232
Kudos: 44





	1. A Fishy Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> This was started as a one-shot project in mid 2019. Then it was a two-parter. Then it was a 3-5 chaptered adventure. And THEN my muse kicked me in the ass and said "make this your entire Blade headcanon, now DO IT." So here I am.
> 
> At the time of posting this chapter...none of the other chapters are done yet. But 3 of them are being structured. I have no idea where this will go for certain, but I do know where one very dark turn will occur that I'm sure you already saw in the tags. Prepare yo'selves - just, not in this chapter.

The base was silent except for the sounds of birds chirping in the forest below. Strange for a mid-day in July at the air attack.  
Maru was cleaning up the shop which had desperately needed it, wondering where everyone had gotten to. The Smokejumpers were out removing debris on a trail, Windlifter was on a two-day vacation up north to see family, and Dipper was out doing...whatever it is that Dipper does. Stalking probably. But then that begged the question: where was Dusty? Hell, Blade even! It seemed mildly unusual for everybody to have just gone off and disappeared. It was getting kinda lonely now…  
But at least he had a full collection of 70s, 80s and 90s rock to play at full blast. More for him then.

Where Dusty and Blade were exactly was a place off the beaten trails of the park that everyone who was in the staff or was a rebellious teen eventually knew. They liked to call it the Secret Dump. An odd name, admittedly, but a fitting one. This was the kind of place that proved to be a good brood spot and a conversation place without the threat of interruptions. And a place to gossip and spread rumors. For Blade, it was just a nice spot to fish.  
The pond was small, too small even to be a noticeable point on the map, and it was well hidden by trees and bushes and hills so that it was never visible until you were right on top of it.  
"So how good is 'good fishing' here then?" Dusty inquired.  
"Get the damn pole in the water and you'll see." Blade said.  
The red and white chopper suggested the outing after having an exhausting first month of fires. For now the weather was on the cooler side - surprisingly - and the winds were low and consistent. It was the right opportunity to relax for a while and take a breath of fresh air while it was there.  
Dusty was thrilled to go. Not only was it said to be good fishing - something he really needed to do more of now and again - but it was a good chance to really bond with and get to know his fire chief, the one who trained and certified him and whom saved his life more times than he cared to admit. But that was past them and the team had all let bygones be bygones, and now Dusty felt the need to start fresh and really get to know the team for more than just courageous firefighters. An afternoon of fishing seemed like the perfect opportunity for such a thing.  
Dusty undid the latch on the reel, swung back a little, and flung the line out into the general area of 'center' of the pond with a little 'plop!' in the water. He locked the reel again and set the rod down into a groove between the rocks that which obviously been used to hold fishing poles before. Blade did the same, holding the center of the pole handle in his jaws as he aimed for the middle of the water. He was a little more successful in his targetting.  
"That was a good cast." The little red and white plane said.  
"No, that was a lucky cast. I'm usually terrible at it." Blade told him.

The sun shone brightly without many clouds to block it, but the foliage of the trees overheard made for a comfortable, shady spot at the bank of the pond. The shadows made speckled patterns of light and dark over the red and white liveries of the two aircraft. Dusty watched intently as a pair of Balsa thrush fought in tree over a bit of food, chirping angrily at one another. Elsewhere in the woods they could hear meadowlarks and other songbirds trilling away, and a woodpecker somewhere making himself noticed.  
Despite the troubles that arose with getting around bushes and trees with fixed wings like his, Dusty truly did enjoy getting to be in the woods of Piston Peak. It was a drastic change from the open, rolling hills of Propwash. They had wooded areas further out around them, but they weren’t quite as grand as the national park’s. It was a welcome change of scenery for him.

It wasn’t but fifteen minutes in the water before Dusty noticed the bobber beginning to jerk and duck under the surface.  
“Wait,” Blade said, before Dusty could start reeling it in. “It might be brim. The hook might not be set yet.”  
The younger male waited a moment, watching the bobber go down, and then float up as though it was untouched, until another, faster jerk dragged it under completely, and kept pulling.  
“There!” Dusty said, grabbing the pole.  
After fighting with both the fish and the reel, the former crop-duster finally managed to reel in the catch - a small but lively little green and yellow sunfish.  
“Not bad, but there’s bigger fish here.” Blade commented.  
“The hook isn’t all that big either.” Dusty said. The poles that they did have were just ones that they’d found while cleaning out an overstuffed closet in one of the hangars, so they didn’t care too much for what they had on them. So long as it worked and caught fish, they figured they could be happy with that.  
The sunfish wriggled and popped off the hook it was magneted to, falling back into the water with a splash and disappearing back into the depths of the water.  
“Standing 1 and 0 so far, I hope you can keep up.” Dusty teased. But then the other lure starting moving too, and he took his words back.  
A couple of hours later, the rotorcraft won with 2 to 4, and they had to pack up and head out to check in with Maru. It was nothing major, but he had expressed concerns around the heat index and the lack of humidity in the late afternoon making for a possible spring up of fires. Their break was short, but well-earned and well spent in their opinion.  
“Any good ones?” Maru asked curiously.  
“Just panfish, but I managed to get a smallmouth Bass out of it.” Blade said.  
“I didn’t know we had those..” Maru said. “But it has been a long time.”

The rest of their afternoon was just as quiet, though hotter and more noticeably so at the base where the tarmac was uncovered by trees. Blade had hung back to let Dusty try spotfire searching on his own for once - he needed the practice as the current second-in-command back home. He had let him a couple of times before, so it was nothing too new to the young firefighter, but it was still an important task that needed doing.  
He was rather surprised though when he had radioed back with a sighting. Patch caught it almost as soon as he did. It wasn’t a very big one, but it’s location was rather precarious. It was running up the side of one of the cliffs, close to the high rocks. If they did it right they could have it out quickly, but the risk of rockslides was definitely something to consider.  
“Do you need the Smokejumpers out there?” Cabbie asked.  
“Not yet. Get them back to the base though, just in case it changes.” Blade said, already starting up his rotors. The red and white Agustawestland went off, leaving Cabbie and Maru at the base, and with Dipper close behind. Dusty was already there.  
The young Air Tractor circled the fire at a close but safe distance, going through a thorough inspection of the flames as he’d been taught. By now it was almost second nature to him, and although he did still slip up now and again, he was definitely better now than he was last year.  
“It’s a shame I haven’t got my pontoons back yet,” Dusty radioed as Dipper and Blade showed up, “would’ve made things a lot easier.”  
“Just scout it out for now, I’ll need an extra pair of eyes on it anyways. I don’t like how far up the cliff it is.” Blade said. He had a bad feeling in his gut about this one, even as minuscale of a fire as it was. Something just didn’t sit right with this one.  
As soon as Dipper had dropped a line against the lower side of the fire, the side farther up caused a spare tree grown into the rocks to crackle and split from the ground, pulling debris with it down the edge. Thankfully the SuperScooper wasn’t in the way of it by the time it had fallen.  
But the Air Tractor hadn’t anticipated the chain-reaction.

Instinct kicked in even before Blade had warned him across the radio transmission when the larger rocks above them on the cliffside had begun to slip. But the way that the wall sides jutted out and curved off in front of him, Dusty could only try to knife-edge and floor it all the way past. He was successful and he wasn’t; He made it out, but not before a few smaller but still decently-sized pebbles pelted his livery. His right tail-fin was bent slightly and his flank had a few new bruises and scrapes.  
“Damn it!” He roared over the static, “I thought I had it.”  
“Better dented than dead.” Blade replied.  
“You okay Dustmuffin?” Dipper asked worriedly.  
“Yeah, fine.” He huffed, “Just a scratch.”  
“I’d head off back to base in case it isn’t.” Blade stated, “I can finish this side out myself.”  
“Roger that..” Dusty said, almost bitterly as he went off back towards the hangars, scolding himself for not having been quicker or out of the way before they fell.

“Can’t have war-paint without a few scars, eh?” Maru commented, overlooking the damage done to the younger aircraft’s side. “Ah but all’s well that ends well. Just a bent fin is all.” he concluded. Dusty sighed in relief.

From the garage he could make out the sounds of two engines headed closer, one being the chopper’s recognizable thundering of his rotors. He and Dipper had made it back without further hassles, fire out completely. But he did have the Smokejumpers sent out to ensure the debris from the rockslide wasn’t blocking off any of the paths nearby.  
“Well at least he’s not fatally wounded this time.” Maru said. “Been getting tired of bad accidents around here. A guy can only take so many boneheads and hotshots in one base!”  
“You say that like there’s a lot of us.” Dusty said. Maru gave him that look like ‘weell, yeah there are, actually.’  
“At least it’s agreed you’re the worst of the bunch.” Blade said.  
“Oh, I disagree.” Maru butted in, “Blade, you would’ve given him a run for his money back in the day!”  
The helicopter’s cheeks started to burn, “I wasn’t that bad!”  
“No, you’re right...you were worse. You had yourself screwed over the first day here!”  
“Oh I have to hear this.” Dusty said, grinning evilly. Dipper nodded in agreement.  
Blade looked about ready to murder the tug then and there. Maru just smiled fiendishly back at him, as though he didn’t know why he was so annoyed in the first place.  
“Well go on, tell them! Don’t let me do it for you, you know I’m merciless.” He said. The older aircraft furrowed his brow, looking anywhere but at him.  
The tug continued, "or I could just radio Paul and he'll tell 'em how you ended up incapacitated for damn near a month."  
His hinting at the story was piquing the two younger plane’s interest, and they looked like they were dying to know more. But they could also tell by the increasing discomfort on Blade's face that it wasn't going to be an easy story to get out of him.  
"...another time." He finally said, "too tired to be tellin' stories. They aren’t nice ones either." This was an obvious bargain to try and get the three of them to drop the subject, but they all took the bait and left him be...for now.  
“It’s not like everyone else’s stories from here aren’t a little gritty.” Dipper added, as the fire chief left.

It wasn't for a couple of days that the young SEAT thought about the conversation again, and went looking for the air boss for answers finally. Maru had seemingly forgotten the topic, and Blade sure as heck wasn't bringing it up. He wondered if the older aircraft might be more willing to tell him if there were less eyes watching him. Maybe if he could get him alone again…  
The opportunity presented itself perfectly when they had another near-perfect day. Dusty managed to coax Blade into a rematch at the pond, and so during the outing he found his moment to strike.  
"So how did you end up at Piston Peak anyways?" He asked him, indirectly of course. But Blade had already been two steps ahead of him.  
"The same as you did. Got trained and certified and then just climbed the ladder over time." He said plainly. Dusty would have to try harder than that.  
"Was it hard for you in the beginning?"  
"At first. It got easier over time. You, of all planes, should know that." Blade said, looking over at him. Dusty but his lip, thinking about how else to approach it. He finally just gave up trying to dance around the question and decided to ask him outright.  
"So what happened on the first day here?"  
"Hell." He answered, "absolute hell."  
"What did you do?" the younger plane pressed.  
"Nothing you need to be concerned about so drop it." Blade replied quickly. He glanced over to find Dusty tucking his landing gear under him to lay in the grass.  
"Care to tell me the details?" He asked, "preferably from start to finish?"  
"You make for an awful interrogator." Blade told him. "But...I guess I owe you."  
“For what?” Dusty asked innocently.  
“For saving my life.”  
“Technically I also caused the risk of your life.” Dusty said.  
“Do you want to hear the story then or not?” Blade snapped impatiently.  
“Okay!” He answered.  
The Agustawestland set his pole down in between the rocks and sat back in the grassy bank of the pond. The skies overhead were clear and as blue as the eyes of the plane beside him, though he tried not to pay attention to such a detail.  
"I came here in late June, 1985. I'd already been working at a smaller city station south of here for a couple years. I met Mayday then. He wasn’t the chief, but he was a lieutenant. A damn good one at that. But I had more problems with the city; didn't get much work, and the noises weren't helping my...recovery."  
"Recovery? From what?" Dusty asked him.  
"...I was dealing with a lot of personal problems back then. Things I'd rather not have to dig up from the past." He said.  
"Oh…" the red and white plane said. He didn't know if Blade was aware that he knew, but he had already guessed why the helicopter was going through things then. It wasn't that long after Nick had passed. They must have been closer than he thought.  
"But anyways," Blade said, getting back on track, "Mayday was the one who suggested I be relocated further north to the national parks. Said they always needed extra help in the hotter months of the year. I ended up taking his advice. Said goodbye to the folks I'd met and who'd been there for me for the last couple of years, and left."

\- - - - -

The sun was just barely beginning to peek over the mountainside as the young Agustawestland flew, eyes fixed on a set of buildings on the horizon. The forest was silent but for the chirps of songbirds in the evergreen trees, praising the sunrise. Even from the damp air the smell of pine wood was evident.  
The lone white and blue helicopter made his way across the national park swiftly, surveying the landscape he'd inevitably be all over soon. The base was just a little further, behind an outreaching cliffside that kept it well hidden from the main tourist place of the park.  
He spoke over the radio to the tower ahead, alerting his approach and access to land. The voice on the other end was cool and casual with a slight southern edge to it. She seemed to know what she was doing well enough to be comfortable about it.  
The helicopter landed over the helipad they had off to the side of the base, in front of a couple hangars which were clearly there to be for other rotorcraft. His first impressions of the base were tidy enough but clearly aged, and with a lot of repurposed things. Most of the hangar walls were not the same color metal on each side, and a few had leftover hail damage.  
The place was quietly busy - if the two words could be put together. He immediately spotted a few different aircraft around, all sporting firefighting liveries with reds, yellows and whites, all apparently focused on their own tasks. One of them, however, a young female Grumman HU-16 Albatross seaplane, noticed the hesitant newcomer.  
"Are you the re-lo?" She asked him.  
He nodded, "Yeah, from the station out in Fowler. South of Fresno."  
"Thinking of trying out with the big leagues eh?" She asked. She had a bright, vibrant tone, almost as bright as her canary yellow livery.  
"I guess so." The Agustawestland replied, a little unsure of himself.  
The seaplane - whom he learned was named Stella - showed him around and gave him a quick tour of the facility, the final stop being at the main garage.  
"Granted he isn't busy, I'd love to introduce you to our main mechanic. He's pretty awesome - well so long as you catch him on his good side." She explained.  
In the hangar were copious amounts of tools and gadgets, in a somewhat disorganised arrangement. Maybe it was orderly to someone.  
"Quit standing in the doorway, geez!" Blade heard someone behind him say. He moved back to see a gray and blue tug-forklift half-breed, with another forklift of a lighter blue beside him. They both carried stacks of boxes.  
"Maru! Paul! Sorry, here-" Stella said, moving back to let the two through. "Oh! The new guy’s here, this is-"  
"Blazin' Blade!" Maru finished for her, "I know, I saw him when he showed up. Nice to meet you in person, kid!"  
Blade looked a bit dumbstruck. "I, h-how do you know my-"  
"You're a TV star, anyone who watches television would know your face. Plus it'd be kinda hard to miss the paint job, even without decals." The older forklift concluded.  
"Went over my head," Stella told them, "then again I don't get time to watch shows. I'll leave you to it then," she finished, turning to head off.  
The blue and white helicopter was lost, mentally and physically. He had been trying to forget about his last career so much that it didn't even register in his head to hear it again. He didn't want to, even. Why couldn't anyone just call him by his legal name anymore? Or would he never be able to forget the past?  
The Agustawestland didn't even notice when the tug started waving a fork in his face.  
"Yoo-hoo, earth to copter! Do you read?" He said. Blade suddenly snapped out of it.  
"Huh?"  
"Your crap." He said, pointing to the set of boxes by the wall. "It got here the same time you did."  
"Oh, uh thanks."  
"No need. You can take the hangar by the helipad for now, it's empty, so convenient for you, right?"  
"I guess." He answered.  
"..Hm. Bit less chatty than I figured." Maru said, mumbling as he turned to work on something lying on the floor of the garage.  
"Yeah.." Blade half answered and half thought as he went to move the boxes - they had them put on one of those roller board things no one actually knew the name of.  
“Oh here, for the tape.” the smaller pittie added, placing a boxcutter on the top of the stack.  
He carted the load back to the hangar and pushed open the doors with a loud creak - it was obvious the thing was old and unused.  
The inside of the hangar was basic, if not almost unfinished-looking. The walls were made of the same log as the outside, sturdy but unfortunately leaving the room a little stuffy inside - or maybe that was just from sitting unused for so long. You could still smell the cut of the Pine.  
There were two arching windows on either side of the room - one over the entrance and one against the roof of the back wall. They both let in a fair amount of sunlight. As did the other, smaller square windows cut into the sides, two on each side of the curve of the hangar.  
Blade left the unopened boxes in the corner for now - he could deal with unpacking later. He no longer felt in the mood to be positive about coming here.  
The only reason he'd come was to get away from it all. To forget the past and try to move on. Sure seemed like a damn good way to start, being reminded of who he was then on the first day out here. Maybe this wasn't a good idea after all. Maybe this wasn't meant to be.  
His thoughts, however, were obstructed by the sounds of sirens going off in every direction.


	2. Silent on the Outside - Screaming on the Inside

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter, but a lot of lead-up to some later issues.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive my over-abundance of non-canonical characters here, I needed fillers for this timeline. The only character I would say is actually qualified to be an official character at this point is Paul, and even then he's not any more than a supporting character in this series.

“What’s going on?” Blade asked, approaching the garage again.  
“Fuel tank exploded.” Maru said, he and the other forklift rushing to refill water tanks. “I hate to put you on the spot but we kind of need all the help we can get right now.”  
“Don’t you guys have a chief, or some kind of leading system?” the helicopter asked.  
“Well, we did,” The light blue pittie chimed in, “until he was fired…”  
“This is kind of a recent thing.” Maru told him.  
Other firefighters were already starting up, engines roaring all across the tarmac. Stella had just taken off after the others, a greyed Fairchild C-119 right behind her.  
"I'll do what I can." Blade concluded, leaving the two forklifts behind to take off after the rest of the crew.  
The explosion was far too close to the lodge for comfort. And it wasn't going to be an easy fix, either. With as much gasoline as there was drenching the region, the fire was spitting out in record time over the forest, gaining speed over the high winds.  
"Get the edges blocked off before it gets any further!" Stella radioed.  
"I need to take care of the tank itself to try and keep it from getting worse." One voice said back. His voice was deep and cracked, but not just from the static.  
Blade waited at enough of a distance to be out of the way while Stella and a couple other tankers and seaplanes worked on the walls. He was impressed with their choices of taking action, even if it got a little messy over the communications. But it was what needed to be done, leader or no leader.  
Blade found himself in a management position before he knew it, however - watching from above he could see where the fire was moving better than most of the planes could. He relayed it to the others and tried to coordinate who was to drop when and where for them, so no one got in each other's way. No one in the established team seemed to mind though; they actually felt relieved of the helicopter’s initiative. No one else wanted to take such a high-risk leadership role anyways, especially not if they were going to go through and get bit in the aft again, like their last boss had, rather unexpectedly. They never knew how bad it was, or had become. Looking back, however, it seemed only inevitable. On Blade’s part, he didn't even know he had been taking over, until the later realisation that the fire was well under control.  
"Guess you showed up to the right place at the right time, Blaze!" Stella exclaimed.  
"Thanks." Blade said, a slight grin on his face. But soon enough, when he realized how she had addressed him, the smile faded. Reality froze, and the past slunk in like a dark, inky black serpent, uninvitedly raiding his subconscious.

He told him it would be alright. Said the weather wasn't that bad today. Hell, it was all supposed to clear up and be perfect and sunny out by noon. He had reassured him, even though things were tough and time wasn't on their side that morning, and he told him everything was going to be fine, the way that it always was. The way he believed would always be.

Only it wasn't.

Two years hadn’t changed his state of mind. He was as afraid of the past now as he was the day of the accident. An accident he could have controlled, but hadn’t. Something he saw coming, like a train barreling down the tracks to the remnants of a demolished bridge, but that of which he never decided to change. How could he have been so stupid! And it was his actions, or lack thereof, that had cost him everything. That cost his partner everything.

Nick would have still been here otherwise.

A part of him didn’t want to have taken charge over the situation with the fire. If he was left to lead, a single mistake would cause another catastrophic upset. He would rather have not showed up to be in there way. He didn’t want to grow close to anyone here - he really hadn’t meant to at his last station either - and he certainly didn’t want to be the cause of any more heartaches, both physical and mental. What happened to him was his problem, and what happened to others would be entirely out of his mind. There would be no strings attached to them - like a stranger dying, there would be no meaning to truly and deeply care. No pain strong enough to rip apart the delicate fabrics of your own sanity and self-control.  
But that was the problem with him. He couldn’t just let anyone get hurt, no matter how little that he knew of them. Not even strangers. Not while he was alive and breathing, and there to help.  
He’d always thought it a weakness. Try as he might, he couldn’t not be in the way to help. Even now his tormented soul remained conflicted; to help and be hurt, or to leave and let suffer. And it was starting to tear him apart. It meant he’d have to endure loss all over again, no matter which way he went, and to feel that pain over and over again until one day, it’d surely push him over the edge.

The team finished the walls around the fire within a few hours of the initial call, hoping that as the ground stayed wet, the flames would die out on their own, and then the ground firefighters could finish off the rest. All was as good as they could get it. For now, anyways, though the lodge may have to deal with a gasoline-burning bonfire for a few days until it was dried up.  
Blade was already on his way to calling it quits when he made it back to the base. His mind was drained and his body was wracked by extension. And yet everyone wanted a proper introduction. They wanted to know the real face behind their favorite actor. Well, sorry to disappoint, but he was no charismatic charmer - quite the opposite, despite his background - and was in no mood to entertain them today.  
Blade sighed and tried to push it all down as anxieties surfaced again. ”Shut up and smile for them, damnit.” He could hear the director’s words ringing in his ears, ”It’s what they came here to see.” Yes, because just smiling gets so many things done in the world.  
“So what’s with the big career u-turn thing then?” Paul asked, while Blade was getting a late start to his shop inspection. Supposedly, Maru and Paul were the “expert” mechanics in the base, and they wanted to ensure that his engine was up to their personal standards before he could be deemed fit for work - even though he was already a certified firefighter and helped them out already in their last incident, but who’s really paying attention anyways?  
“Just..something I always wanted to do.” He lied, knowing full-well that such a fib could lead down a rabbit-hole of problems. But he didn’t care. He just wanted to get out of this organisation-forsaken garage and back to somewhere he could breathe in peace.  
“I thought they went and cancelled the series after...you-know-what.”  
“They considered it.” Blade answered flatly, grinding his teeth until they hurt.  
“Poor kid.” Paul mentioned, “They shouldn’t have let him do all his own tricks. Especially not at his age, with his kind of experience.”  
It took a miracle and then some for Blade not to have ripped the thin metal plating right off that pittie and crush him like a tin can. It also took a miracle and then some not to tear out of the garage like a madman and say “To hell with you, I’m going back home!”. How he hadn’t snapped yet was anyone’s guess.  
Maybe he was just past the point of no return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part of the reason this chapter is so short is because of inability to write well, and then dealing with the creative muse taking a masochistic jolt in the other direction for the sake of storytelling. This is why writing becomes hard, everybody doesn't want to be included because they know the muse is going to royally f them up.


	3. Spikes Like These

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS: character self-harm

The young helicopter paced in his hangar. His head was buzzing with thoughts, too many of them too real for him to fully process. He’d just gone through possibly the most agonizing thing in his life, sitting quiet and listening to two hooligans talk shit about the only person in his life that ever mattered to him, like they knew him - which they didn’t.  
He wanted to tell them. No, they didn’t deserve to be told. They already passed a threshold into unforgeability. Maybe he’d be better off sending a bullet through their windshields. He just wanted them to regret what they’d done. Or pay for it. Or maybe they were right and he had been wrong. Maybe everything was too far gone now to be repaired. They probably wouldn’t even bat an eye if he up and--  
Wait.  
He suddenly paused his frantic pacing, dead silent, like he was listening for something. He glanced over at the pile of boxes that he’d brought up, remembering something the other pittie had left on top of them. A single, small item, laying precariously on the top of the unopened cardboard containers.  
‘They won’t notice.’  
He wanted to deny his own thoughts, but he couldn’t.  
‘They won’t care.’  
Nothing else in his life seemed to be in his control anyways.  
‘It only hurts for a moment.’  
What the hell did he have left to lose?

\----------

“You think he’ll stay here?” Paul asked absentmindedly, putting away tools and cleaning up for the night.  
“We’ll have to wait and see,” Maru answered. “The kid’s obviously stressed the hell out.”  
“What makes you say that?” He questioned.  
“Engine rate.” He answered. He was silent for a moment. “I think..you should probably leave him be about anything CHoPs. We all should.”  
The other pittie froze in thought, clearly not catching onto what the older forklift meant. “How can you tell that bothered him with an engine rate?”  
Maru just sighed and shook his head, pulling up the data from this afternoon on the old piece of junk they called a computer and having a physical copy of it printed out, and then handing him the graph recording. The print was still warm in his tines as he peered over the image of the red line as it weaved across the page.  
“Oh,” Paul answered, “That’s how.”  
Maru hadn’t seen spikes like that since their last chief’s recent divorce. He’d made a lot of bad decisions since then. A lot of them involved alcohol, even during work. They fired him flat-out because of it. Maru had inwardly hoped the old gruff would come to his senses, but it would seem he hadn’t. The last they had heard, he wasn’t long in ending up in a psych ward.  
Paul was stacking oil cans, about to ask Maru another question, when he heard the metal ‘clank!’ of whatever was in the other’s tines hit the floor. But instead of picking it up, the half-tug half-forklift hybrid suddenly blitzed out of the garage like he’d seen a ghost, headed for...oh. Oh.  
Paul had the mind to grab one of their small ‘ER’ kits before he took off after him.

\----------

Maru never questioned how he knew these things. He never had so much as a shred of evidence most of the time to know something so suddenly. Maybe it was just a gift. Or a curse, depending on who you’d ask. But he trusted it like instinct. Mechanic’s instinct is what he’d call it.  
He always knew when someone was hurt, even if he hadn’t seen it. He knew when someone had died, before anyone else knew it. And he knew when someone was about to make a decision against the act of living, even if he had only been in their vague presence a mere half-day. He’d never seen spikes like these.  
The hill to the entrance of the hangar was one he cursed over - why did it have to be made so steep? Racing up them was giving him so little traction, he nearly fell backwards. Thankfully his tires dug in deep and he managed, working up a sweat in the process but that could be dealt with later. He was already aware of the sound of the helicopter on the other side of the doors as he forced the latch open - the kid probably never knew they had no outside locks for a reason.  
There weren't any words in the next part. There wasn’t need for them, nor was there time for them when the tug half-breed went after that orange boxcutter, tightly secured in the other’s jaws. He’d made a garbled, mangled form of a growl in defense, but the other didn’t care as he grabbed the other end of the stick - unfortunately it was the sharp end, but in a way that was better. They ensued in what was basically a tug-of-war match, a forklift hybrid against a sixteen foot tall, fifty-four foot long and roughly fourteen thousand pound Agustawestland AW139.  
But at least the forklift didn’t also have a gaping hole in his side.  
It looked fresh. Not much yet had managed to spill out, so that was good. The forklift was already making mental notes to work around the possible wiring he may also have gotten through to while still fighting the helicopter. He hadn’t backed down from the fight when the sharp blade of Blade’s blade had cut across his tine, leaving a sizable scar across it. Just grunted a bit and yanked the boxcutter to the side, hoping to wrench the back of it out of his tightly-clamped back molars where he was strongest.  
Already, he could tell the other was getting weak, fighting and pulling back but also dipping unusually low on his landing gear, fighting survival instinct to curl up and address the undoubtedly massive amounts of pain in the side of his frame. Maru also couldn’t tell if the shaking was from the tension of the pulling or because he himself had begun to out of the sheer volume of the situation. Or both.  
Then one of them slipped up, and the fight was over. Blade tried to yank back and to the side, and as Maru pulled in the other direction, his front landing gear began to slip from under him, and in his panic his jaw gave just that tiny amount of release over the boxcutter, and then it was gone from his being.  
Maru’s victory was short-lived, however. He’d just fought against those razored teeth already, but now he suddenly faced them up close and personal, and they were...sharp, he’d say that.  
“You fucking-- ow!”  
Blade fought back savagely for the boxcutter, attempting to mangle the tug half-breed in the process. Well, until he all but stuck a hard metal tine jaggedly down into the side of his throat, causing him to gag harshly and tear off of him in an instant.  
“That’s what I thought!” Maru snapped, holding his side. He had saved himself from being entirely crushed, but not from a few noticeably dented in teeth marks in the corner of his plating. It was a good thing Paul showed up in time, before the helicopter got another bright idea like literally chewing the mechanic out.  
“I already hit the alarm so the others should know--” Paul began saying, until the blue and white chopper, gash starting to bleed, interrupted his informing.  
“I’ve had enough of your crap! You can’t stop me! I’ll throw myself off the damn cliff before I hear you bastards talk shit about my partner again!”  
“We weren’t, we didn’t know!” Maru tried to reason.  
“Like hell you didn’t, I--”  
“We weren’t trying to make you feel like crap, and we weren’t trying to say anything against your partner. I’m sure he was a great guy,”  
“And you don’t know the half of it, you don’t know what fucking hell I’ve gone through, just to come here and deal with your shit!” Blade’s tone started to waver on shaky and hoarse.  
“Look, just calm the flip down and we’ll get this sorted out. We can talk this over.” Maru tried to offer. Blade was obviously beyond the point of just talking it out, but maybe if they could let him calm down half a degree they could still try to reason with him over his decisions. The most dangerous aspect of the fight was over now. If he could just get to fixing up that gash in his side before he lost any more fluids...  
Thankfully for the two pitties, they weren’t at this alone anymore. The combined yelling of the three of them had alerted some other members on the base, and a couple of them were just approaching the hangar now. The first ones there were two terrestrial vehicles and a roughly middle-aged Fairchild C-119, the same one Blade had seen taking off from before. They were a very large plane in fact, but even larger up close and on the ground. Without so much as raising up on his landing gear, he could look over the other two vehicles to the situation in front of them.  
A situation in need of explanation.  
“This is your field, not mine.” Paul said finally, though it was unclear whether he was speaking to Maru or the C-119. Presumably it was the latter, as he just sighed hoarsely, like it brought back undesirable memories.  
“Kid,” he started, Blade immediately recognizing his rasp over the radio from earlier that day, “Don’t try bowin’ out of the show just yet. You’re still here, and you still got reason to be. I dunno what happened but it sure as hell didn’t look like it ended well. But we’re all here to help each other, not hurt em.”  
“And what happened earlier wasn’t any personal jab at you,” Paul continued, “We didn’t know the situation.”  
Blade stayed silent, content to sit in the middle of the hangar and stay fixated on the cracks in the concrete floor. This wasn’t the first time this had happened. He’d done it before, many years back, back when he again had no reason not to.  
Between a new city and a new job and a whole new life from what he knew before, stress got to him a lot. It was the first time he started having migraines, and when they hit, they hit hard. And on top of that, he was dealing with trying to fit into a group of other actors he didn’t know, but obviously seemed to know one another. His co-star, he felt, was the worst of the bunch. He was flamboyant, loud, and had a thing for showing off. He never thought he’d ever be able to communicate with someone the likes of Nick.  
So it was surprising, and scary in the moment, that Nick had caught him then. He didn’t say anything then, neither of them did for a long time over the suddenness of it. The fact that he knew what was going on, and on the other side the fact that he knew what was going on. Even more sudden was the way the Hughes was always there for him from that point on, the memory of that silent embrace sealing the concept that someone else was looking out for him.  
They were never the same way after that night. Not after what they knew. Nick in particular seemed to come down from off his cloud for Blade specifically then, taking the time to get to know the chopper and form a deeper, more personal relationship. Blade, in turn, finally found a reason to stop.  
Well, until tonight.  
It wasn’t going to be the same, it never would be. Nick was too special to be replaced by anything. But, the people here weren’t like what he had expected them to be, what he had judged they would be. They weren’t snobby or condescending, or judgemental. They cared. They had no idea what was going on and they would never be able to understand the entirety of the situation, but they cared. As much as he wanted to push them all away, he wouldn’t be able to shake the thought from his conscious that they were here because they cared. Maru took the boxcutter away because he cared. The team showed up at the hangar doors because they cared. The C-119 made him realise that they really did, and he was about to take all of that for granted.  
He breathed deeply, sighing on his landing gear that had begun to ache. His side was still torn open, and now the remnants of the fluid draining out was dripping onto the floor, slowly but steadily. A migraine was beginning to buzz in the back of his mind already, but he ignored it. It was common ground nowadays.  
“C’mon,” Maru said, “let’s get you back to the garage.”  
Blade wordlessly followed the other back, along with Paul who trailed behind them. The others left, though the C-119 stayed watching the Agustawestland leave. Maru wasn’t the only psychic on the base, and it had been a very long time since he’d seen spikes like these.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Yes, those are the actual specs of an AW139. I did some digging through wikipedia and the 139 model was the closest match, and the only one that has been stated for multi uses, including fire fighting. I know Blade’s kind of a hybrid mashup of several different models like everyone else, but I think that one is the closest to him I could find.  
> -The blade of Blade’s blade...sorry even in adult situations, I couldn’t help myself.  
> -I know people who have hurt themselves on purpose before. And the only thing you can ever do in that situation, as a friend, is be there for them. There’s nothing else you can do. It’s their choice whether or not to stop. But as long as I can be there for them, and love them, then at least I can show them that I care about them, and I’m there for them when they need it.  
> -This chapter took the most time thus far to make. It’s been put off for a while before I decided to pick it back up and finish it. Thanks to someone’s humble suggestion, I’ve more importantly included Cabbie (yeah, the C-119) for this part. It made sense, and even though I’ve personally never written this character, at least not more than as a background role, he’s a pretty cool guy.
> 
> There’s the potential of some backstory-ing around Blade and Nick’s families in the next chapter, but we shall see where my muse takes me. :P


	4. In This House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which little to no content actually presents itself. Mostly expositional filler and background, and a reminder that this is still Blade's coping story inside of his Piston Peak story, inside of Dusty's Piston Peak story but continued...inside a fanfiction. Riddle that one for me.

Dusty sat, mouth agape, as Blade finished his part of the story. Never had he imagined just how bad things were back then. But to think, as dark a time as it was, he still pulled through it, he was still pressing on today. It was a thing beyond just admiration.  
Though he didn’t ask, the thoughts started to form in his mind about whether anything like that ever still happened. And who else on the base now knew, if any, other than who were directly involved? Come to think of it, what were all their pasts really like, as little as he’d known from his boss alone?  
It took a few moments of silence for the newly deemed firefighter to process everything. Blade waited patiently, as though he knew, and he was used to the reaction. It answered at least one of Dusty’s questions.  
Out of all of the questions that could have been first for the crop duster turned firefighter to ask, the one which won out as first was probably the least expected.  
“Who were the two others with Cabbie then? Smokejumpers?”  
“Formerly,” Blade answered, “One retired a while back. The other has a picture on the Wall.”  
“Oh…” Even knowing the reason behind the wall and respecting everyone who ever became a part of it, it never ceased to bring dark imagery to the back of the SEAT’s mind. How they ended up there, and who was there to witness it. He hoped that in his career he would never have to be the latter, but it was wishful thinking. He was sure Blade would have thought the same when he started out.  
“And...what happened to Paul?”  
“When Cad showed up and a third of our team ended up getting laid off, he moved back up to Seattle. We still try to keep in touch, Maru more than anyone else. They’re a bit like friends with benefits.”  
Dusty was about to produce the most shocked-looking face the world had ever seen before Blade swiftly corrected himself, adding, “They’re tech nerds. They swap info and find better suppliers for each other. Paul’s the reason we were able to save you from your crash to begin with. He got in touch with some people about replacement parts we didn’t have, hadn’t needed until then.”  
“Right.” Dusty said, shutting up after that. Explanation needed, explanation given, no questions further needed here. “Was there more to tell?”  
“That was act _one_ , champ.” Blade said, “The rest of the story is the one Maru had been teasing about before. And trust me, it makes the former look like a cakewalk.”  
“I have a bad feeling I know how it might end.”  
“You’ve got the right idea.”

\- - - - -

Back in Maru’s garage for the third time that day, Blade sighed, a sigh of relief for the first time since he’d been here. Paul was patching up his side, to the best of his ability at least, though it didn’t look very pretty. They didn’t want to risk painting over it again if it wasn’t healed all the way yet, so for the time being his white and blue paint would be off-set with the gaudy, rough-looking bare sheet metal.  
“We could repaint you entirely when it heals.” Maru suggested, “You’ll need an official team livery at some point anyway.”  
“Do you have a uniform color scheme?” Blade asked. He was too tired and too dizzy from the outcome of the last half-hour to want to mention anything about it again. Best to avoid that topic for now until the time was right to bring it up. And the others were aware of that.  
“Not really,” Maru responded, “but black and white is in 90% of them. And I guess red and yellow are both popular. Unless you’re Paul.” He shot a look over at his co-worker, in his baby-blue paint and white striped sides. Paul shrugged his tines, “I wouldn’t look good in red or yellow, honestly.”  
“He would.” the tug hybrid said, pointing in Blade’s direction. Blade looked more skeptical. “The only other color palette I’ve ever had was beige and brown. Red feels a bit too...strong.”  
“All the more reason.” He answered.

Even days after, when the patch was starting to heal - among other scars - Blade was hesitant of the idea to change colors. He had been when he started CHoPs too, though, to be perfectly honest. He was known for being pretty picky, especially when it came to color schemes. It was a sense he had always had and had never been able to let go of.  
That’s why he was glad when Nick did his first, among some of the other actors. It was from that that he could trust those in charge of their paints to do their jobs right. But he never thought he’d like the new one over his original as much as he did.  
He’d always had the same paint job before then, as far as he knew. Beige base, with a chocolate brown top and accents and a cream-colored underside. Simple, and extraordinarily clean-cut. It fit him to a T.  
But he wasn’t going to go back to that style. That was a style that remained in his early years, where it belonged. He’d be sad to see his CHoPs style gone too, but, he felt, it was a chapter of his life in need of closure, and what stronger way to explain that then physically changing the thing that always reminded him of it.  
Though he didn’t have the same pre-viewing before it was done, Blade felt that he could trust Maru with the task of a new style. So, for once in his life without needing to be convinced by someone else to, he let himself go, and let someone he didn’t entirely know take care of it.  
Turns out by the end of it, he did entirely know him. There was lots of conversing between the sanders and the layers and the waiting. A lot of waiting, actually. Enough waiting to exchange life stories.  
He’d learned that Maru was originally from Illinois, working as a general-maintenance mechanic for a long time before taking a wild shot to work at a fire station nearby, which supposedly paid more than what he was making at the time. He lucked out on it, though, until a friend mentioned a station way out west in ‘beyond desperate’ need for an on-base mechanic. He took the risk, and ended up hired on the spot. So he packed up, moved out and set up in the base. He’d been here ever since.  
Paul was a friend of his from back in college, when Paul had also been intent on being a musician. He was still amazing with a guitar to this day. But he had been hitting snags and needing to find work, and wanting to get out of the depressing skies of Seattle for a while. Piston Peak had the exact views he had been wanting, and getting to work with an old friend was always a huge bonus. He joined in about a year or so after Maru had, and, like him, had been there ever since.  
In turn, Blade opened up about his own life story. He belonged to a military family, oldest of four, and they had jumped state to state in his childhood until his father retired. They then settled in Redding, California, until Blade decided to take up acting - something he’d been interested in since middle school - full-time, and risking moving south to good ol’ LA in his mid to late twenties. He struck a gold mine with CHoPs, and despite his initial fears of working with such a big team and with such an exuberant co-star, he grew to really enjoy his work.  
The time came, then, to mention something else that he felt he needed to get off his landing gear. Their relationship. As much as people then were against it - more so it feels than today’s standards - he and Nick were, in fact, eventually romantically involved. But they were never open about it to anyone else, save for a couple of trustworthy co-workers, and they also never made it official. They still saw other people then, and they both knew if they wanted it to be “official” they would have to go through both of their family households for it. And that wasn’t happening.  
But that didn’t mean they didn’t find out.

What was supposed to be a simple catch-up call between the family turned dark, when Blade made the stupid decision to think if he came across with it well enough, they’d be smooth sailing afterwards.  
More rather, they smooth-sailed into a storm.  
Blade’s family, or, to be precise, his father, was oldschool. Traditionally Catholic, they were brought to believe anything involving the love of one of the same gender was a sin, and something to be shunned and outcast. And Blake senior, knowing his firstborn son of the same name, was one of “them”, was livid.  
“Never, in this house!”  
“Well I’m not a part of this house anymore, am I!?”  
“You’re certainly not.”  
They hadn’t spoken a word to one another since. Blade didn’t try to, he knew he’d never be able to convince him otherwise. His mother was less cold-sided than him, and still remained in touch, but she was never particularly fond of the idea either.  
It was amazing then, to think that Nick’s own family, raised oldschool Catholic as well, would be so loving and so accepting of him, of them. Like he was one of their own.  
He was essentially adopted into the Lopez family, even more so after the accident, along with Lilia, a girl Nick had been with for a short time, and who had discovered she was expecting not a week after the crash. Nowadays, she and her daughter, Elizabeth, live just outside of Portland, Oregon. And yes, in response to Maru’s immediate question, she was Nick’s. That much was evident in the identical model variant, and the eyes.  
“And he never knew?”  
“She hadn’t even known until after the accident.” Blade responded.  
Elizabeth was a little over two now, but Blade could still remember being there for Lilia in the hospital. They all were, even mama Rosario - Nick’s grandmother, and the head of the family, respectively - who couldn’t get around as well as she used to, was there for her when Elizabeth was born. It was a proud, yet bittersweet moment to know that she wound up looking just like her father had. And being there to support Lilia as a single parent was something the entire family took upon themselves to assist with.  
“So basically the last three decades of your life have been a rollercoaster?” Paul asked.  
“Pretty much.”

When Blade’s first official firefighter paint was donned, it was simple, red for a base with a white underside and a full black top, going from his visor all the way down into a thin dorsal stripe to his tail. The same theme that his original style was, just recolored, and with the Piston Peak logo across his tail. Of course, he still had the same dark hood of his nose - that part of his design he absolutely refused to change.  
“It’s nothing too much, but not too little either.” Maru said.  
“It’s just right.” Paul concluded.  
“I like it,” Blade said, observing each side of himself in the mirror the two had set up in the shop for him, “I never thought red would look good on me but...well, here we are.”  
“It didn’t fit you until last week happened.” Paul said. The comment earned him a wrench to the side.  
The rest of the week was spent getting used to the base norms. Blade had already gotten set up in his own hangar, with Paul and Maru’s help - “You have been hereby suspended from the use of any singular small sharp objects until further notice” - and now it was just getting accustomed to their system. Which, without any fire chief to speak of, wasn’t all that systematic.  
Actually it was chaos most of the time.  
The mechanics were really the only ones that had set work schedules, that being that they were available for repair jobs 24/7, and lived off of Redbull and coffee with unholy amounts of caffeine. Everyone else rotated shifts as well as, “Well, I’ll sleep now and then you sleep when I get back up”. The whole layout was basically fucked.  
At the very least, everyone could hold their own in the case of an actual situation. In the air, most everyone was good about staying out of each other’s ways and communicating their drops. But oftentimes, Blade would end up in the thick of the traffic, and it wasn’t long before the older vets of the gang started to get onto the fact that he’d make a good chief.  
“I don’t see why you couldn’t reach battalion chief within the year,” Stella commented, one afternoon following a slew of spotfires on the east side of the park, “You can start at entry-level, as long as you’ve got the Bachelor's degrees in fire science, public administration, and occupational safety.”  
“I did all that back in Fowler already.” Blade said. “I just don’t know if I’ve got the right kind of experience...and then there’s the obvious.”  
Although none of them had shared the exact details, the mechanics and the C-119, which Blade had come to learn was named Cabbie, had let the team know not long after about the ‘situation’, and that they needed to leave him alone when it came to anything about CHoPs, at least until things were better sorted out. For now, all they could do was try to get him set up with a therapist somewhere, and of course continue with all of their team support.  
“I still say you’re the best candidate we’ve had in a long time.” Stella said, “I bet we’d be the best crew in the district!” The Grumman HU-16 Albatross always held a positive attitude. That was something the now red and white helicopter respected, especially in times as bleak as this.  
Learning the ways of the base was something he’d need to know too, regardless of whether or not he had intentions of making it to battalion chief. The way things ran, or rather how they used to, was strikingly different from the fire station he’d been at before, where he’d been trained and certified. Everything here had a sense of scale to it, a feeling of importance, of real need. He could admit it intimidated him. And everyone else seemed to just go with it, like they’d been doing it all their lives - though in truth, for a few of their older members they kind of had.  
When alarms rang out across the base, rather than the “oof!”s and “ack!”s of the Fowler station’s herd of newbies, this crew had it down like it was a routine. There was rarely ever an actual _plan_ , but somehow, as a team, they just did it. And well, he admitted, even without an accredited leader. It made the idea of coming into such a position so soon so nerve-wracking.   
_‘No,’_ he thought, _‘This is something I’ll have to earn.’_

No sooner had the thought crossed his mind did the sirens go off. Starting up his rotors already, he hardly noticed the forklift yelling to him from behind.  
“Be careful out there!” Maru didn’t typically say things like that around the base. It was ‘too soft’ for the likes of his ‘stone-cold soul’; “as if” the others would say. But Blade wondered if there was a reason behind his turn, why he seemed to feel the need to say such a thing.  
With growing dread, he’d also begun to wonder if some of that bad-luck ‘instinct’ had worn off on him. Or maybe it was just that strong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Yeaaah I know I ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, _again_ , and it’s the same type from the _first_ chapter, but you know what, I’m trying to set up for another big thing, and I don’t know what I’m actually doing this time so shutup! Wait it out!  
>  -Maru’s backstory is somewhat based off of my own dad’s, who has been a mechanic all his life, and who went for an interview at a fire department out of state for a mechanic position, and was hired on the spot. I like to think he and Maru are very similar in that they both know what they’re doing, and have been doing it all their lives; they also both have to deal with too many things to be done and not enough time to do them all.  
>  -Can anyone see the massive hints of Imagine Dragon’s “radioactive” here? Donned? Red paint? Ehh?? But seriously, this story will probably have a lot of subtle song references because _someone_ might have mentioned music-listening while writing and I might have tried it and...you know the rest. Be on the lookout for anything Imagine Dragons or Twenty-One Pilots - those are usually my first choices with Blade-related tunes. Although sometimes country comes up too.  
>  -Note “last THREE decades”. Okay so there’s another thing I’m making that has a better and longer definition, but for now it’s this: we were wrong about Blade and Nick’s ages during the CHoPs series. So wrong. The concept art proves this, as in VERY tiny writing, you can see the headline of a news clipping of Nick’s crash from the wall, which quotes that he died at the age of 36. Ergo here, Blade’s almost but not quite 40 _here_ \- my HC says he had about 2-3 years of training at another fire station, where he met Mayday, before he ends up with the PPAA, and he was a year older than Nick was.


	5. Eye on the Sparrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warnings now for the intensely dark themes in this chapter. Not going to say what they are, but seriously, prepare yourself.

Thunderstorms were rolling in, fast. Flashes of white light set the skies ablaze for merely a second, before darkness again claimed the clouds. Thunder boomed and rolled across the cliffs, chasing after the light spectacles in the sky. A scene as beautiful as it was dangerous. And this perfect storm was about to reign an all-out hell across the park.  
Blade had only ever gone this fast once before. He shuddered still to think about it. He was hammering down at 193, 194... the needle all the way to the edge of the red, and he still wished he could go quicker. 195, he wasn’t even cleared to be able to go this fast. But that was what happened when you get hybrids - even with only slightly varied heritage, crosses tended to have random picks with genetics, in a wider range than you’d think. Both of Blade’s parents, who were non-pure themselves, had 193mph maximums. But he just passed 196. He hoped he wouldn’t spontaneously combust. As he neared the cliffs, he was hoping and praying that against all odds, they were alright.

\-----

Thunderstorms were just a fraction of the problem; The Grand Fusel Lodge, the big hat of the whole park, called in for a search party from their air attack team. Somebody was missing. _A minor._  
It had been a little over four hours since Madison and Clark had seen their daughter, Amy. Last they had seen, she was with a kids trail group near Anchor Lake. It wasn’t uncommon that while parents went to enjoy the more historical trails, park rangers and summer camp leaders would set up special trails for the young’ns to keep them from getting bored. Usually they included scavenger hunts or other interactive games for the group. What worried the team, however, was the trail that they used for the day. Generally the kids' trails went up around the lake and back, with one part going over a bridge. That meant a high risk for high waters, sure to be with the coming rain. They needed to find her, and fast, before the rapids did.  
Blade was the best they had - well, more the most _capable_ they had, for an aerial search. Not everyone had the ability to hover and pivot mid-flight like rotorcraft did. He also had a hoist, which came in handy for just such occasions. So with Smokejumpers on the grounds all through that region of the trails already, Blade had to become their eye in the sky for the scouting mission.  
Amy was only ten, a Mustang GT, described as being burgundy with silver accents, with hazel eyes. Unfortunately, a hard color palette to find in a forest filled with brown pine needles and leaves. But the team was determined to do their best.  
Panic had begun to make itself known across the Agustawestland’s face as he scoured the hillside for any sign of the child. He was forced to double, and sometimes even triple-check every other rock that protruded from the earth that even resembled the shape of a vehicle. It had been about an hour now that they had been looking, and there was no sign of her. Not even a trace. Being so young, tracks that might have been made in the ground would be so light, barely noticeable under a foot of pine needles and brush.  
And then, an hour and a half into the search, one of the Smokejumpers radioed out to Blade to check the outskirts of the cliffs, to the far side of the lake. It was a long shot, and a risky one to boot, as it meant the chances of finding her perfectly okay were...slim. But the cliffs were close to one curve of the neighboring trail, so if she got lost on the wrong path she’d have ended up going by it. The helicopter took a deep breath, checking the treeline once more, before turning towards the cliffs.  
They had wandered to the other side of the valley where the trail started, so the cliffs were quite a ways off. But seeing the clouds rumbling in, Blade knew if he was going to search there, he had to get there now.  
He closed in on the cliffside at a whopping 197, the needle of his speedometer sticking past the red bar into the tiny region of black. He could feel the burn of his engine, being pushed to its limits. Luckily he didn’t have to go on for much longer. As soon as he could view the cliffside in focus, he came to a halt, engine happy to slow itself down, though still rumbling, boiling hot.  
For as long as he could, he scoured the rocky landscape, every rock and bush putting him on edge as his mind tried playing tricks on him. He waited for every update from the ground searchers on the other side of the park trail, panic rising still as nothing new was reported. His core beat through his system, hearing muffled with it’s every pulse.  
It was beginning to drizzle. Then it was sprinkling. In less than a minute, the rain began to fall in earnest, the wind whipping it across in waves of lighter and then heavier rain. Water lashed at the helicopter’s side, but he wasn’t going to give in. Even as lightning began to strike down closer and closer to the park, thunder getting louder and more in sync to every strike, the red and white chopper pressed on. He couldn’t let another down again.  
Then the unthinkable.

\-----

The report came in jagged, both from the heavy static and from the helicopter’s wracked tone as he fought against choking sobs and strained cries. But enough was known for the team to turn their attention to the cliffside. There, at the bottom of the valley, their goal.  
Taken by the impact of the fall.

\-----

Blade didn’t stick around to see the rest, once they had confirmed that it was her, and radioed to the Lodge about their find. It was their worst case scenario, but at least they had found her. At least they knew.  
The base was told, too. Maru sighed, cutting the radio off. He didn’t know what to expect anymore from the rookie when he returned, which he had just found out would be in the coming minutes. As the sound of the steady beat of rotor blades approached the station, he was already waiting outside of the garage.  
The first ones were always the hardest.

It was CHoPs all over again. He couldn’t stop himself from the horrific images that bombarded his mind the moment he touched down on the base. The moment his shock and denial was cleared, and he saw the reality of the situation unfold before him. He had broken his own promise to himself. He was too late to save her, too.  
He wasn’t on the base anymore. He was standing in front of Nick, watching the end. Watching him succumb to the flames, to his dying core. There was nothing he could have done, nothing anyone could have. The realisation burned inside of him worse than the burns against his body, boiling through paint and metal and twisting them into horrid things. Demons lurked in every crevice of the scene, buzzing like a swarm around them both.  
 _He’s gone._  
The form in front of him glitched and reformed into a much smaller being - a Mustang GT, laying broken and dead in the ditch of the canyon.  
 _She’s gone._  
The trails of demons swirled all around, enclosing every concept of light or life from around him. Every shrivel of hope.  
 _You were too late._  
He was losing himself to the darkness. Like drowning, and he couldn’t fight the pain and panic any longer.  
 _You couldn’t save them._

Then darkness was all that remained.

\-----

His first conscious thought was that he had died. All he knew was surrounding darkness and a numbness in his body he couldn’t rid himself of. And then there was a song, somewhere in the distance, it’s singer somehow familiar, yet still entirely unknown to the chopper. But he knew the words.  
It was an old song, very old. He remembered every word, every note of that song, because he and his peers all recited it in choir each Sunday morning.

_“Why should I feel discouraged,  
Why should the shadows come,  
Why should my heart feel lonely,  
And long for heaven and home…”_

He hadn’t heard it in so long. It brought him back thirty years, back in Redding, California. His childhood, his family. Hearing it now brought a bittersweet twinge; He once had a great relationship with his family, until he came out about him and Nick. He and his father had never spoken a word since that fight.  
The young chopper had torn himself up about it then, practically tried to pretend his co-star and partner didn’t even exist for two weeks straight. When the Hughes finally deigned to ask him what the matter was, he finally caved. And Nick set the record straight for him.  
“Look, you be what you want to be,” he told him, “and if they only want to see you as shameful and something to be turned away, then they’re hypocrites. We have a saying in _our_ house: Love _always_. That means we don’t care what you are, what you do, how far into the pit you get, we love everyone. Because that’s what we’re here to do.”  
“You’re too good for this world.” He always said, whenever Nick had to remind him of those principals.  
Love. It was the same form of admiration and care that the unknown singer put into every note of his song. The same way Nick did when he sang, usually to get something off his mind.

_“I sing because I'm happy,  
I sing because I'm free…”_

Letting his own cares go, Blade lip-synced the last lines of the song, as he had always remembered they were sung;

_“For his eye is on the sparrow,  
And I know He watches me.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Cut shorter than I thought because this and ch. 6 I think will act as just one massive chapter, so I cut it down into two.


	6. Wind's in the East

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Still plowing through chapters, I think this is going to be the beginning of either the last or next to last story arc thing, so we're probably about two thirds of the way through. We'll see what happens!

The sun was already beginning to set, turning the sky into a whole new palette of warm violets and soft oranges. Fireflies began to emerge from the grass surrounding the pond, floating around careless and free.  
“It’s a good thing Trigger is up for the night.” Blade commented, as he and Dusty began their trek back to the base. The day’s fishing was good, but not nearly as intriguing to Dusty as hearing Blade reminiscing about his past with Piston Peak. It made his own certification look like smooth sailing - well, the end of it, anyways.  
“I can’t imagine what it was like, witnessing that first-tread.”  
“It’s part of being a firefighter. These are the kinds of things we can’t prepare for, but always have to learn to cope with.”  
“I’m glad I haven’t had to yet..” Dusty said.  
“I’m glad for that too,” Blade responded, “But someday you will; We all do. It’s a part of life. It ain’t pretty; Folks die. But for every life you lose, there’s dozens out there still you can save, if you chose not to give in to fear.”  
“Wow.” Dusty said, “You know, you can get really motivating and preachy when you want to be.”  
“Eh, old theater habit I guess.” The air boss said, with a noticeable hint of embarrassment on his part.  
“So...what kept you going then, after all that?”  
“Ah. Well, you see-”  
“ _there_ you are, about time!” Maru called, as the two aircraft approached the base. “Thought you _died_ or somethin'! Was about to have the Smokejumpers go out to get you!”  
“Just sharing war stories.” Blade responded.  
“Oooh, someone gets special privileges!” Maru said, as though his sarcasm wasn’t obvious, “We all had to _deal_ with the experience, you get to sit back and watch the recording!”  
“Yeah well I wasn’t even _born_ then so I couldn’t have!” Dusty shot back. If Blade could have facepalmed he would have.  
“Don’t make me feel older than I already am, Champ.”

Though the SEAT hadn’t been a member of the Piston Peak Air Attack team for very long, he had grown pretty accustomed to the way they ran things. He had to, like everyone else did when they all showed up, or had to adapt to them when they changed - though he was pretty sure they’d always held some varying level of chaos in their systems.  
Actually, the team nowadays was less like a team, and more like a family. After losing a third of their staff at the beginning of Cad’s evil reign, what was left of their crew had to learn to make due with whatever - and whomever - they had, so in the process everyone became a lot closer to one another.  
It was surprising then, to Dusty at least, to see members who worked so baritone and seriously still seem to have such deep connections with their co-workers. Windlifter was by far the most confusing.  
“So did he tell you the whole story then, or just the ‘not-personal’ pieces?” Maru asked over the supper tables, sitting beside the Sikorsky. Both looked more intent on eating than actually conversing.  
“The whole thing, I think..” Dusty answered, glancing over to the air boss for a nod of confirmation.  
“Wow,” the tug said, in between mouthfuls of potato soup, “that _is_ special privileges!” Blade just rolled his eyes.  
“Technically I didn’t.” He said, “I hadn’t gotten time to talk about how Wind got here.”  
The Sikorsky lifted his eyes to the other at those words, suddenly seeming to become invested in their conversation - though still steadily grazing on his bowl.  
“Wait, I thought he wasn’t a part of the team yet back then?” The SEAT questioned.  
“He wasn’t. Until that fall.” Blade said.  
“I remember it like it was yesterday.” The green chopper finally said.

\-----

The red and white helicopter was more or less absent from the crew for the next couple of weeks following the accident. He’d become lethargic, something in all his life he’d never been, and had been actively skipping meals in the main hangar. But the team retaliated on him, poking and prodding wherever they could to try and urge the chopper to do _something_. But he was in a grey state right now, nothing good or bad seemed to come of it. It was all just as meaningless, just as dull. Life continued, yet flourished not.  
The idea of him trying to apply to become a battalion chief was, for the time being, withdrawn from his mind. What would become of every member of the team would rest squarely on the leader’s helm. He wasn’t ready for that commitment yet.  
Weeks later, still in the same rut of borderline depression, Blade was waiting in the workshop on a replacement tire - one had been punctured and gone flat - and while listening to Paul trying to find the right size, he picked up on his very _familiar_ sounding whistled tune.  
“ _You_ were the one I was hearing last week!” He blurted. Paul’s whistling came to an abrupt end, and he looked up at the helicopter, befuddled.  
“When now?”  
“Last week, when I came back from..the call. Someone was singing that song.”  
“I don’t think I saw you at any point then, I thought you’d just gone to your hangar and passed out for a day.”  
“Might’ve. I don’t really remember the rest of that day much anyways.” Blade said flatly.  
“Point is though-” Paul said, placing a couple of tires down by the helicopter’s defective one - without knowledge of the right size wheel, he’d just have to do it the old fashioned way - “I don’t think it was me. I haven’t heard that song in _ages_ , until one of the tree workers reminded me of it.”  
“Who?”  
“I dunno, one of the lumberjacks that was here.” The forklift told him.  
“What? When was that?”  
“Last week! You don’t remember?” Paul quirked an eyebrow in confusion, “We had some old trees cleared in the backside of the base so they wouldn’t fall on any hangars, that cliff’s been looking kinda rough lately.”  
“Oh..” Blade had to stop to think if anyone he hadn’t known was from the base were here, but came up blank. Paul must’ve been right, maybe after his apparent episode his instinct just led him to the hangar to pass out for the rest of the day. He wouldn’t have been surprised, it’s not the first time days had slipped past without his knowing. Still, you’d have thought he’d woken up to the sounds of unfamiliar vehicles working close to your sleeping quarters.  
The blue and white forklift finally found the right size tire for the helicopter’s landing equipment, and set to re-fitting it. Blade couldn’t help but wonder if the song he’d heard from then was one of those workers. It couldn’t have been, surely. But it had felt so real…  
The day was particularly hot, but so far nothing had come up as far as work was concerned, so Blade spent the first half of the day lounging. He’d found some comfortable places on the base, as well as off it (technically) that were great for sun-bathing. At least he wasn’t cooped up in his own hangar anymore.  
As the helicopter began to doze off from where he was perched atop a flattened out cliffside, he was startled awake to the sound of a chopper approaching in the distance. It wasn’t the sound of your normal chopper, he knew. The rotor beats were heavy and loud, and he could feel the minute rattle of the earth from their vibrations. It was the type of vibration only a larger aircraft could stir up, one the likes of Cabbie or some other heavyweight. Nose lifted to the sky, he could just barely make out the silhouette of a Skycrane over the treeline, obscured by the broad sunlight but visible nonetheless, headed towards the station.  
The curious copter made his way back down from the cliffside, headed towards the garage as the Skycrane closed in.  
“What’s the visit for?” He asked Maru, currently the only mechanic in the shop.  
“Dunno yet, we’ll see. I think he’s one of the guys that was here last week. You don’t see too many choppers like that around.” The tug said, over the growing sound of the rotor blades. Dust particles were blown around as the much larger helicopter touched down on the runway. He was a dark green Sikorsky, with a single, broad white line down his side, and a tribal pattern etched into it. The helicopter was the exact picture of calm and unphased, yet not in a distant or angsty manner. He had a kind set of features, even under his powerful and initially intimidating structure.  
“Welcome back!” Maru greeted, “Did you guys forget something?”  
“No,” the Sikorsky replied, nonchalantly, “I came to ask about your department applications.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Ah my goooooosh 100 views! This is make me happy hooman. XD  
>  -This chapter might be a bit shorter and less interesting than the last few, but rest assured I do plan to keep the momentum going and get some more interesting crap underway. It’s just that we’re moving into the next arc and such so there’s some buildup we gotta plow through. Hang in there!


	7. At Night They Lurk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Windlifter updates and some more depresso - like this story needs more of it XD
> 
> Warnings to sensitive flowers for some disturbing imagery (although if you didn't know this would be here you should'a read the warnings)

“You’ interested?” Maru questioned, gazing up at the forest-colored Sikorsky. The helicopter nodded politely.  
“Well, ahh I think I know where the papers are, but we need a chief or higher to review it.”  
“Is that..an issue?” The chopper asked.  
“We’re chief- _less_ at the moment.” Blade finished for him, while Maru was already trailing off in search of the applications.  
“I can still get the district manager and see if they could do it,” Maru called from the back of the garage, “But he’s up to his eyes in trying to get us a ringleader.”  
Blade hadn’t thought about the subject in a little while, but he still didn’t feel like he’d earned the trust of the team to take such a high position so soon in his time with them. He hoped someone more experienced would be able to, Cabbie or another of the vets maybe, but they held off. He didn’t get it, why had they wanted _him_ , as socially distanced and mentally unfit as he was. Leadership was probably the last thing he would say he was capable of.  
Maru managed to find the application papers, slightly crumpled and coffee stained but intact nonetheless, and while it would be sent up to the district manager to review, the chopper would need his official certification elsewhere - without a chief on base they had no way of legally training.  
“Hope to see you back in a few months then!” Maru said, as the two finished up and the helicopter parted ways. As the whirlybird made his way out to take off, Blade caught a few lyrics of a song he was singing to himself, albeit quietly. It wasn’t in English though, some foreign tongue he’d never heard before. And much deeper toned than the song he’d heard from before.  
Finding the source of that song was starting to nag at him - as though he needed another thing to keep him up at night - and for all his guesses at finding a reason for it to have existed, he still came up blank. He _knew_ that song, those tones, that voice even. It felt so clear and yet so faded from his mind that he couldn’t grasp it anymore, like how childhood memories may blur away over time.  
As the big chopper left and the smaller returned to his perch, he couldn’t help but feel that the origin of the moment was simply unexplainable, simply too out of this world and out of worldly logic to explain. Perhaps, though, so long as he held onto their words and took comfort in the unknown siren’s song, perhaps he could will himself to go on into tomorrow, into whatever remained of the rest of his life, one where he might possibly end up working alongside the Sikorsky. For now, he could press on through these bleak-feeling times. He had a feeling this season would soon be coming to an end.

\-----

Two months went by fast when nothing much happened in your life. Blade had almost forgotten about his and Maru’s visit with the Sikorsky until he had a deja vu moment that afternoon, looking out to find the helicopter having returned earlier than predicted.  
Letting a recruit in without a captain to overview it all was a difficult task. At least before Blade had been here, their last chief had still been in office to give the helicopter the o-k. The situation with hiring the Sikorsky would be at least double a normal application’s complexity.  
Thankfully, all minds in the process were prepared for the job, and less than seventy days later, the park officially introduced a new starting-level recruit to their circuits.  
The chopper’s name was Windlifter - or at least that’s what he was called. When asked about why he decided to up and abandon his job as a lumberjack for such a demanding job like firefighting, he just shrugged,  
“It felt right.” He said.  
“No real reason? Just..called to you?” Asked one of the team’s members, to which the green and white helicopter only nodded his confirmation.

He was a strange one alright.

Stranger still was the air between him and the other chopper. It wasn’t any sense of distrust or hatred between them, but it was clear that something was just _there_ , like a presence of uncertainty, as if one couldn’t read the other as well as the other could read them. Or maybe Blade feared the chopper could see right through him. That scar on his side wasn’t clearing up any time soon.  
The lack of open communication seemed to irk the smaller helicopter as well, just slightly. By no means was he considered the socialite, but he still felt the desire to communicate, especially in such a needed line of work where team cooperation was a must. He just couldn’t place the heavylifter as easily as some of the others. There was no label, his personality just filtered into the “unknown” box, and nothing the red and white chopper did to try to change that made any impact.  
The uncertain air seemed to keep the Agustawestland quieter than usual in the field, as well. He still took charge when the situation was dire enough, but so long as everyone else worked cohesively, the green chopper just fell into place. Like he’d been doing this for years. Blade just didn’t get it, how could he make it look so _easy_!?  
Coming back from another fire down in the park, Blade was still mulling over his thoughts of the new guy. There wasn’t anything about him that he could dislike exactly, he just couldn’t understand, and by extension couldn’t accept, how easily the other could just fit into a totally different lifestyle. And how _he_ , by another extension, couldn’t.  
Finally turning in for the night, he made note to try to make the effort tomorrow to ask. If by some miracle he could find himself willing to.  
Perhaps they’d be able to find easy space after all, he hoped.

\-----

In the middle of the night, the full moon still shone brightly across the park. It’s silver beams coated the treetops in glistening, cool tones. Blade took the time of peace and quiet among the world to explore the trails in the parks for himself.  
Rotors folded together kept the beige helicopter from striking anything with them - for the tree’s sake and his own, as rotor blades were hypersensitive to touch. The moonlight washed against his multi-toned tan livery, making it appear more purple and blue than tan. The loose dirt trail in front of him was wide and flat, but up ahead it would soon turn towards another part of the thicket with denser brush than before.  
Shadows trickled across his frame under the thick, dark foliage of the trees. Crickets chirped from somewhere near, but he couldn’t see them. He could only listen to their sound...that sound...the song!  
Beyond the visible spectrum of the trail, he could hear it - the distant, wind-muffled tones of the same song he’d been tossing and turning each night over. He rushed past the winding trail, following the sound until it grew louder and clearer, until it was just over the hill.  
At the crest of the incline, the trail ended, opening up into a wide meadow. Tall, silver grasses swayed like ocean waves against the breeze, but no source of the music could be seen. In fact, as he tried to listen for it again, it had ceased. So had the crickets. All that remained was the wind of the meadow.  
Strong winds, swirling and whistling, pushing against the broad side of the Agustawestland’s body. He dug his wheels down into the earth, standing firm against the currents. Looking around, the grass began to whip back, harder than they had before, no longer a gentle current but a raging storm.

_“Blade!!”_

Across the harsh whirls of the wind, someone was screaming. Calling for him. Blade was on full alert, looking around wildly but finding no one around him. Daring to move out further into the raging meadow, he tried to call out to whomever was clearly in trouble.

_“Blade!!!”_

The sound grew louder, clearer, and in his frantic search the helicopter suddenly stopped dead in his tracks.

He knew who that voice belonged to.

Apparently, so did the darkest corners of his subconscious.

Until now, the shadows and conjoined whispers of his demons were never physical. They swarmed around his nightmares leaving hyperrealistic reenactments of Nick’s crash. Then, it had been enough to finish him, mentally anyways.  
Now, they were upon him, and not just that he could sense them, he could _feel_ them; cold, rippling swirls of black matter infested the ground, reaching for his landing gear and clawing at his sides, feeling like cat scratches against, but with icy touches that made him jump and pull away. Then a larger apparition formed, its tentacle-like arm twisting around and grasping the helicopter by the tail boom, tightly.

"Ahhg!"

The ground fell apart under him. He'd have gone tumbling into an abyss of darkness had it not been for the monster holding him by the end of his tail.  
It hurt; the tentacle wrapped around his tail was painfully tight, and the limb was straining against holding the rest of his body weight. If it wasn't a nightmare, he knew that he'd be tail-less by now. He'd have preferred it that way in this situation anyways.  
A floor of sorts formed under him, not close enough for him to reach but at least for him to see, looking down over it as another apparition formed.

_"B-blade…"_

'No…'

'Please…'

As the situation became clear, the helicopter started to struggle and fight, against the demons, against the scene, against his nightmare as a whole. If he knew what was happening why couldn't he fucking wake up?? Thrashing, the helicopter made to release from the creature’s grip, but only succeeded in making the situation tighter and more painful.  
Try as he may, he couldn't win. Fighting back tears now, there wasn't an escape he knew. All he was left with was to suffer, by watching _him_ suffer, looking over the scene as he hung helplessly. Watching the flames dance across the now dented, twisted metal, pulling up the once smooth white and blue paint job. And the screams. He'd wished he had been born deaf so as not to even know what a blood-curling shriek for your life sounded like. It hurt to say he knew. It was impossible for someone to tell him it was okay, that his partner didn't suffer.

He did.

Nick's screams were joined by another, the Agustawestland's own as he tried desperately to get to him, or to get away from all of this, to just make it stop. The pain was as physical as it was mental, his entire body wracked with grief he couldn't escape.  
The demonic apparitions coiled, tightened, _spread_ into the rest of his body, cold trails working their way into his systems. They infested the helicopter's body with the gut-wrenching agony and misery he'd carried for years now, the weight of their being too much for him to take.  
He could feel the end of his tail beginning to snap, the fins beginning to pull back against the dark matter that clung to him from above. Then all at once, the final split of his drive shaft sent the chopper down, nose first into the sharp, jagged metal that had once belonged to a life form. The flames rose, encapsulating both, to bring the both of them to their final, suffering ends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -CLIFFHANGER! Not sorry. But really, I'm sorry, this took three days for me to will myself to finish before readers start asking me to update, and it's only here now because yesterday I had another late-night poke from the muses (who I need to lock in a room somewhere until needed) with some disturbing ideas to add, AGAIN.  
>  -Saying this again because..well, I can, but this is the reason I like Blade: I _get_ Blade. It’s easy to get into his head for me. I just..I understand the hiding, and the deflecting, and the ‘coming off cold but really underneath is very caring and sensitive’ kind of thing. I can relate.   
> And so by extension of that I guess, that’s where all of his little faults line up: the overthinking, the awkward or obsessive overlooking at every social interactive, both his own and between others, just that out-of-body type watching that turns into an internal affair with yourself over whether you’re any good or if anyone _actually_ cares, or if they just say that to be nice and then abandon you when you needed them the most… sorry, I’m rambling. Point is I get Blade. Blade gets me. And this is why this story is here.  
> -As I’m going through this story and kind of repeating some sections of thought process on Blade’s side, I realised I did something I didn’t plan on doing; more than just the story of Blade becoming a member (and later a chief) at Piston Peak, and dealing with his loss, this is also a story of him learning to become confident - honestly something _I_ could deal with getting a repeat lesson on. Not a cocky kind of confident, but self-confidence; Hey, you got this. It’s okay.  
> -Honestly though I still think I’m least happy with this chapter because I think it cuts too much, it feels too choppy (no pun intended) and stiff for me. I dunno, what do y’all think?


	8. Unspoken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part 2 of 'At Night They Lurk' sorta. Mostly dialogue. And it's short because I'm tired of looking at this thing.

Blade would have woken up screaming - if not for the fact that he was choking on air first. He stumbled out of his bed in a coughing fit, sides and front wet from the culmination of tears and condensation off of an overheated engine. Everything ached like he'd pulled things out of alignment, and waves of hot and cold kept washing over his frame in uneven patterns. He shook off whatever shadow-demon creatures might have remained on his body, shuddering as he labored for breath.  
The hangar was dark; It was around two in the morning. The air was damp from his nightmare, having been thrashing in bed for Chrysler knew how long, but the air near the windows was cold against his plating.  
His hearing had barely registered the sound of someone knocking at the door, until he'd all but jumped out of his own paint as they tried the door again. Who on earth could even be awake this late, aside from...well, in all fairness it could have been Paul or Maru. Who knew when, even _if_ they slept.  
Blade was surprised to find the nightly check-up wasn't from Maru or Paul, however, or even the old C-119 Cabbie, but Windlifter. His expression at the door was no different than it was any other time of the day, just as calm and unreadable, minus the few extra lines of concern around his eyes that you'd only see if you squinted.  
"May I come in?" He asked, as politely as though he was another travelling salesman, and Blade was just another stop and wasn't undergoing yet _more_ emotional rapids.  
"Sure.." Blade said, not knowing what he was saying or thinking, just moving aside for the larger helicopter to come in. The shock of the unexpected visit left him a bit dazed.  
Windlifter moved in silently, smooth enough that you might even forget he was on his landing gear.  
"What are you doing out this late?" Blade commented, getting a grip on his senses.  
"Listening to the crickets." The older male said, "the forest is lovely at this time of night."  
"Shouldn't you be trying to sleep though?"  
"I felt something needed to be done before that." He answered, rather cryptically. The other quirked his brow in confusion.  
"So you...sat and listened to the woods...while waiting for something to be done?"  
"No," the helicopter corrected, "I was just waiting on a sign."  
The younger chopper looked all kinds of confused. What was this lunatic _actually_ doing, alone outside at night and close enough to his own hangar to know when he'd startled himself awake. Unless his screams were that audible… Coincidence or not, Blade had the feeling the Sikorsky knew a LOT more than he let on.

"How long have you been with him..."

Blade looked over at Windlifter, curious at such a random remark, about to ask what he meant by 'him', when he noticed he hadn't even been _looking_ at him. He was peering off to the back corner of the hangar, as though he had just asked the wall that question.  
Blade stood staring, rather awkwardly, at his guest, as his eyes remained glued to the other side of the room. It was a good solid minute before the helicopter even made the notion to look back and realise the other was still there.  
"Well...thanks for the visit, Wind," Blade said, "but I think it's time to turn in for the night."  
"The grief you bear is a heavy one." He said suddenly, "One few so young can withstand."  
"What?"  
"Your past bears great turmoil."  
"So they ratted me out to you, then?" Blade asked, hitting an acidic tone of disgust. Of course, without his consent, the crew had let Windlifter in on the story. Or part of it at least. He had hoped the situation about CHoPs could at least stay within the walls of whatever team members knew currently, and not go beyond that.  
"No one from the team told me." He said calmly.  
"So how did you know?"  
"I was only told to come find you."  
"Who told you then?" Blade said, growing frustrated that they were back to square one, if the twitch of his rotors were anything to go by.  
But the green copter hadn't answered, instead glancing back towards the corner. Blade stepped in front of him, demanding that eye contact.  
"Who told you?" He asked again, with clear definition in his words.  
"A spirit." He answered, not the slightest hint of sarcasm or spiteful nature in his tone. The red and white helicopter's anger seemed to deflate somewhat, though he was more confused than relieved. He didn’t know what to think of the older anymore, deciding rather to watch the light beams on the floor than to look for the truth in the other’s puzzle of a stare.

"Blade," Windlifter spoke, nudging the other to look back up at him, "I only ever knew one thing coming here; I was called to guide another. I believe I was brought here for a reason, more specific than just to help others, and more crazy than because ‘fate said so’."  
"How…” Blade chose his words carefully, “How do you know then, if _this_ was the right call?"  
"...Your past speaks for itself." He answered, and again, his eyes flicked back to the corner. "Believe me, I understand your burden. It has taken me years to come to terms with my own. But I promise you, the worst of the sting will not last forever."  
"Then...why does it still hurt, after all these years…"  
"Because you’ve never truly accepted it."

Blade felt on the verge of tears, not just from the helicopter’s words but from the weight of their meaning. Truly, he _hadn’t_ come to terms with Nick’s loss. He was in a state of denial for so long, by the time he caught up with the present, the past was too heavy to hang onto any longer. He’d already endured this for two _years_. How much longer could he keep denying what was right in front of him?  
"How.." The Agustawestlands voice began to crack from the strain of holding himself together, "how do I deal with this…"  
“Pick up your pieces. Learn to live again, to love, and to love living.” The other said, “Do it for who you care about, and for those that care about you. Do it for him.”  
Blade tucked his nose against the other's side, stifling choked sobs and hiccups. Windlifter stayed at his side quietly, an unjudging and unwavering kindness about him that the other could cling to.  
An unspoken bond formed between the two in that night, a silent connection between the steady and the soul-wrought, where the lost could pick up their pieces again, and follow their guiding light back home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -“You do it for him..that’s how you know you can win,..you do it for her-- that is to say, you do it for him.” -Steven Universe song  
> - **“Grief is like the ocean: it comes in waves, ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.” -Vicki Harrison**  
>  -most males are usually described as "having the emotional range of a teaspoon". Blade however is somewhere in the category "the emotional range of the ENTIRE FUCKING OCEAN".  
> -THIS CHAPTER WAS HARRRRRRD. I have combed through it three times over and I still think it’s missing some things, but I’m tired of looking at it and I just want to put it up so I can get to the next part because I want to finish this story and get to my next big project. Also maybe a 2-parter of the orange sweet potato’s birthday - cuz I can.  
> -Wind understands his grief? Ooo potential story arc later :3 not here though, I’m tired. XD


	9. The End of The Beginning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The title says it all...
> 
> *NOTE: going on a potential hiatus from this project so be aware that this might be the "last" chapter up for as long as it takes me to get the rest of it done.

“Needless to say, not much has changed about ol’ Wind.” Maru said, as Blade finished.  
“If anything, they’ve gotten worse.” Cabbie added from across the mess hall.  
“I go where I’m lead.” Windlifter said plainly.  
“Wow,” The SEAT breathed. If he was any more bewildered by the series of events leading up to where they all were now, the expression would have permanently glued to his features.  
“Anything else need some tall tale-ing?” Maru asked, another full cup of coffee in his tines. Why he was drinking that this late in the evening was anyone’s guess. Dusty wondered if anyone on this base even slept.  
“Uhh, well...what happened about the situation with the battalion chief then?” Dusty asked, “When did Blade finally decide to take it?”  
“I’ll take this one.” Windlifter said, to which Blade nodded his agreements.

\-----

After the admittedly odd confrontation between the Agustawestland and the Sikorsky the previous night, both helicopters seemed to level out with one another in their understandings. Windlifter wasn’t talkative, but the two understood each other, in a strange sort of ‘I’ve got your back when you need me to’ type friendship.  
He wasn’t Nick; that much was blindingly obvious. But at the same time, _not_ being Nick, or being like him, felt like a breath of fresh air for the helicopter. He wasn’t reminded of the what-once-was, but rather the what-is-now. It lifted an apparent curse from his mind, and it wasn’t long before the rest of the team started to catch on.  
“Well you’re in good spirits today.” Stella commented, seeing the red and white helicopter actually _out_ for once with the rest of the gang at the table, and more still, actually choosing to willingly _eat_.  
He had forgotten how much he’d missed this, like being back with the crew in LA where they oftentimes would get food as a group and discuss their show lives around it. Not even being a part of the conversation, just getting to be there, to listen to the shenanigans ensue, was something he had begun to truly miss.  
"Hey Blade," Paul called, rolling up to the group in the hangar, "here-" - He set down a letter on the table for him - "you have mail."  
"From who?"  
The forklift shrugged, "Dunno. Looks professional though, I'll say."  
The envelope was a plain white as you'd expect, but there was a detailed symbol printed across the top flap of the letter: two Boeing 747s, pulling out at each side around a golden emblem with olive branches and flags on it, and illegible, presumably Latin, wording detailing the edges. No 'from', only a 'to' on the corner.  
"By the way," Paul added, as he moved away towards the coffee pot, "I never knew your legal name was 'Blake'."  
"I did." Maru stated from across the table, " 'ts on his resume."  
"Yeah, I just..never use it." Blade admitted. Since CHoPs, he'd never gone by Blake, nor had he tried. He hated the idea of being reminded that he was the jr. to Blake sr., his father, with whom he had very sketchy standings with. He wasn't him, and never aspired to be after what went down.  
The red and white helicopter fumbled open the letter, finding not one, but three pages of words in it. And they looked professional - government level professional.  
No one spoke while the Agustawestland delved into the note - both because they were too busy eating, and too busy trying to eavesdrop on whatever the curious letter was, if anything interesting.  
As they soon came to find out, it was so interesting that they no longer wanted to know what was actually in it, because not a paragraph or two into the first page, the helicopter's face became noticeably pale.  
"Are you okay?" Windlifter asked.  
"...I think I'm gonna be sick…"

There wasn't enough time to save the floor from its fate. At least it was concrete.

There was a solid half hour between the receiving of the letter and the aftermath of its effects before Blade was well enough to explain what it actually _was_. And more specifically, what it might mean. To be on the safe side though, the letter was given to Maru to read over and explain.  
“They’re opening a cold case…” He breathed, “But that...how would they..” He flipped through the other two pages, clear confusion and alarm on his features.  
“You don’t mean…?” Paul questioned.  
“They don’t think it was an accident anymore.” Blade answered for them. “They think he...he was…” he couldn’t finish his words, instead lowering shakily on his landing gear over a newly-placed trash can.  
“They think the CHoPs accident was a homicide case?” Windlifter asked.  
“Sounds like it,” Maru said. “That’s unbelievable...who would even try to do something that low..”  
“The world’s full of pretty messed up folks,” Cabbie commented, “and it only takes one.”  
For the time being, they didn’t actually _need_ Blade for anything - but the letter was a heads-up that they could be in contact in the coming days for any information they needed from him. Surprisingly, at least to him, they didn’t believe he was their first go-to. But he _was_ in their apparent “top ten” list for information, so eventually, and potentially soon, they would get to him. So much for the sense of finally feeling he’d moved on from that lifestyle.

Despite the earlier invitation to confronting his own trauma, there was still much to be done on the base, today especially. Blade tried to push the situation past him, on top of the soreness in the drive shaft of his tail boom that seemed to linger on from the night of his sick, twisted dream. How exactly he had physically strained it so bad was beyond him, but he was tired of ending up in Maru’s garage for such minor, unexplainable things. He was certain Windlifter knew as much, if not at least about his thoughts surrounding the new CHoPs case, and so he never tried to ask him if he was alright - he knew the answer.  
What surprised him, however, was that the green helicopter seemed to be hiding his own secrets - and not well. He seemed to have a growing frustration about something, even as they worked, and for the life of him the smaller chopper couldn’t pinpoint what exactly was bothering him.  
“Everything okay?” He asked him finally, one afternoon in between calls.  
“ ‘M...” Was his answer. Didn’t really pin down even the slightest thing about the situation.  
“I know I can talk to you.” Blade said, “So...know that you can talk to me, too.” There was a long moment of silence between the two as the older contemplated his words.  
“I just...wish I could do more.” Windlifter said, finally.  
“More about what?” The red and white heli questioned.  
“More in the way of helping you.”  
“But you’ve..done so much for me already. I can’t even begin to express my gratitude.”  
“It isn’t enough.”  
“It’s _more_ than enough,” The Agustawestland protested, “Wind, you’ve...pulled me out of a darkness I didn’t know I was in. I woke up, for the first time in...weeks. Months. Hell, two fucking _years_ , and-”  
“And it won’t last forever.” Windlifter cut in, “I know it, I can feel it...A storm is headed close…”  
Blade sunk a little on his landing gear. The thought of the situation now with CHoPs sent cold chills down his back; It was like facing all of his trauma again, head-on, over bigger consequences. It was like learning that one small incident in the world was connected to the much bigger chain of a worldly situation.  
“We’ll..be prepared for it.” Blade answered finally, “When it happens, we’ll be as ready as we can be.”  
“Blade…”  
“I’m not going to be any more ‘ready’ to face that now than I will be in another two years. Continuing to run away from it won’t help. You showed me that…”  
“Do you think it will be _enough_?”  
“It has to. Otherwise I’m…” -he gave a quick, frustrated sigh- “I’ll never get past this.” Blade turned back to face Windlifter, “But I got here, didn’t I? It took some time and some help, but I woke up, I accepted cruel fate, so help me damn it, it _has_ to be enough because I’m trying to _make_ it enough! I know it hasn’t looked like it...but I _am_ trying…and I know you’re trying to. But you’ve done everything you can. It’s my move next.”  
Windlifter gave a sigh, eventually nodding his reluctant agreements to the other. He wasn’t wrong, there wasn’t anything more now that he could do as a means of helping, other than what he was doing already: engaging, listening, and protecting in whatever ways he could.  
They would have to wait and see then; wait to see what would happen with the new opening of a case, and what might soon be asked of Blade; What would then become of his state of mind, whether peaceful or returning to his former state of depression; And what would become of their relationship, whether strengthened or loosened, and their roles among their crew. The waiting game was a dreadful one, left hanging in suspense over what would become of them next. But the wait, and the subtle hints of peace within it, they found out, would come to close much sooner than they realised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m just using the notes as a means of updating you all at this point, since AO3 has no status update or personal-life features yet (y’all should work on those...hint hint…), so prepare for lengthy dialogue.  
> There’s a good chance that I’ll be “away” from this project for a little bit. I’m not abandoning it, I’m not ditching it, I’m not re-making it. I need more time to go in with what I have and make the “second half” of this story really something. There’s a lot to cover, questions to answer and stories to unfold, so while I am still working on it, I will not be regularly updating them chapter by chapter for a while like I’ve been doing. Hopefully you guys can remain patient with me, I am really excited to finish this and show it to y’all! Yes, I had the demonic mind to give you a new story plot and then leave everything on a cliffhanger. At least you’ll know what we’re getting into for act 2!  
> Lastly, I know this isn’t much. It’s not literary genius, and I’m aware it isn’t perfect. But knowing that there is at least that one person who can look at this and go, “yeah, I like it, it’s cool!” is beyond awesome. And even if there isn’t that one person, I do this for me. It’s fun, it gives me something to do, and it gives other people something to read. You know, when they’re...stuck at home in quarantine bored out of their minds with nothing else to do…  
> A’ight, so I’ll be back eventually with more content, but until then check out my Props to the Proppies short stories! I added labels for what stories were specific to what characters. I add to there at random! Also, I do have a one-shot planned but it’s been kind of a butt lately so no confirmation of when that’ll be done, but it is being done and it’s gonna be great.  
> Oh! **I’m taking suggestions!** If you have a short story or an idea you maybe haven’t seen yet but want to, send it to me, maybe I’ll make something out of it, who knows. Lately I’ve been spilling a bunch of Piston Peak and CHoPs shorties, and I wanna get out something for the WATG racers, I just...don’t have any good ideas yet. I can’t make a Ripslinger headcanon, like it’s against my code to try to build a headcanon when someone else’s is unquestionably the greatest Green Tornado headcanon ever devised. But maybe I can try at least.  
> Either way, let me know what else y'all might like to see.


	10. Undead Vow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I am back from my hiatus, with about four to five chapters DONE, and I'm about ready to get back to my writing-on-a-whim schedule. Here we go ladies and gentlemen, the last parts! And it's gonna be a good one!

[Previously:] _The waiting game was a dreadful one, left hanging in suspense over what would become of them next. But the wait, and the subtle hints of peace within it, they found out, would come to close much sooner than they realised..._

Before the next part of the last story could be explained however, the team was interrupted again by the wailing of the sirens outside.  
“Your call chief.” Maru stated. It was past dark already, the skies turning a cloudy, inky purple. The light of the moon did what it could, but even it wasn’t enough to feel safe about night flying.  
“What’s the word, Patch?” Blade radioed, headed towards the end of the runway with the others, rotors beginning to kick up.  
“ _Trouble._ ” Came her reply.  
“Well shit…” Cabbie said.

\-----

The fact that there was an active shooter threatening the grounds of the Lodge was bad enough in and of itself. What was worse was that it wasn’t the _first_ time they’d dealt with one. There were a couple of times before, one before Blade’s employment, and one about ten years ago. Both incidents were neutralized before anyone was killed.  
The police station was the first to be contacted, but since they were located outside of the park, those dispatched from the Piston Peak team showed up first. Though he was shaking in his core, Dusty was called to join Blade and the Smokejumpers on the scene, both because he was required for that kind of job in his second-in-command (albeit by default) position at Propwash Junction, and simply because he was the smallest and fastest aircraft they had.  
By the time the total of five vehicles all arrived at the scene, however, the shooter had already made a run for it. Blade never even touched the tarmac, before taking off towards the treeline starting behind the structure. The Smokejumpers went to assess the situation at the Lodge, radioing information on the suspect’s description and last-known information, leaving Dusty to chase after the red and white helicopter from the air.  
He couldn’t have gone far; Both aircraft knew even for a sports car, he couldn’t outrun a plane, or even a helicopter, through the thick of the forest at night. He was described as being a dark burgundy vehicle, presumably some hybrid of a Corvette, with no otherwise distinguishable markings, and dark eyes. Two vehicles had since been injured, but were both in stable conditions. The suspect had been seen pointing a gun towards the Lodge staff and residents as well, making a statement over something relating to the police and other emergency personnel. They’d assumed he was likely under intoxication.  
Until the police could show up and continue to aid in the situation, finding the suspect had been left solely to the two aircraft, one of which felt ill-prepared for such a task.  
“Are we sure we can-- I mean...how are we supposed to handle this? W-when we _do_ find them, I mean..” Dusty stumbled over his own sentences, but thankfully for him, the air boss knew what he meant.  
“Our job is to apprehend the suspect - leave it to me to take care of that. What I need you to do is keep an extra look out for them.”  
“Okay, copy that..” Dusty replied.  
“Can you make it to the edge of the canyon?” He then asked.  
“Wha- by _myself_?”  
“I’ll send Windlifter out after you, but we need to cover more ground, and you’re the one with the higher speedometer.”  
“Uh..y-yeah, yes - copy that.” Dusty said. He was about to veer off when he noticed Blade looking back at him.  
“Just keep a level head,” he said, “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”  
“..Roger that.” Dusty replied, the faintest hint of a smile forming. He knew the younger plane was terrified, so the reminder was beyond a relief to him.

But that was the last time Dusty saw or heard from his chief that evening. He’d gone off to the edges of Augerin Canyon in as short time as he could, and the distant beat of heavy rotor blades confirmed backup was on it’s way as well.  
It was hours of searching, before Windlifter radioed to retreat back to the base. The park had already put themselves through shutdown now, and there were enough cops out in the park that they felt they only needed one active aircraft on the lookout - they still had to conserve their fuels in between fixing their budgets.  
But Windlifter hadn’t gotten a response from the air boss to move forward. He then went through to Patch, hoping it was only a manner of communication errors, nothing more.

She couldn’t get anything but static either.

“The radio system must be faulty on his end.” Windlifter concluded.  
“No..no, it’s not that.” Dusty said, tone on the verge of panic.  
“Dusty…” The green chopper warned.  
“No! Wind, I..I don’t know, I got a really.. _really_ bad feeling about this. I don’t think it’s just the radio, I...I don’t know how to describe it.” He knew he sounded crazy. “But you have to trust me, I _know_ it’s more than that.”  
Windlifter looked over at Dusty, contemplating. He’d tested him like this before, and though he paid for it in the end, he had also been able to save the two he knew were in jeopardy. And he had to admit, there was something undeniable about the crop duster, something the older chopper had really begun to notice since that day; A _spark_ , or otherwise a sign of something he could only hope was true. And that spark is what led him to his decision.  
“Patch, send Dipper out for the overhead watch with the others - Seven and I setting out a different search and rescue mission.” ‘Seven’ was a Windlifter-specific nickname for Dusty. It was like a private callsign.  
“You think Blade might be in trouble?” She asked.  
“Affirmative..” Windlifter replied. The two aircraft pull away from their path back to the base, the Sikorsky choosing to head north, beyond Rail Ridge.  
“How could he have gone this far already?” Dusty asked, “Even the shooter couldn’t have gone this far, it’s a dead end anyways.”  
“It’s been hours now. They could be anywhere.” Windlifter said, tone not wavering in the slightest, “I don’t want to rule out any possibilities.”  
“When you say ‘they’...who are we trying to find then?”  
“If your hunch is right,” the elder told him, “then if we find one, we might just find the other.”

\-----

Something wasn’t right - there was no doubt about it. Something was… _missing_ , set off course, redirected, lost…

He flew alone. He had no trace to follow anymore, no sense of the other’s presence, of which he’d long since vowed to protect. They weren’t passed on, surely, or he’d have dissipated too - but he could no longer locate his partner’s soul. Like he’d just...vanished.  
_Help_ \- he needed to find something, some _one_ who could help. Someone that could understand, that could reunite the lone husk to its other half. Its living half.

There were only two he was aware of, that he felt were - or could become - aware of him. And they were close. Turned towards the northern side, where the rock came together and cut off the rest of the world, he followed their faint trails. _‘Help,’_ he thought - the only form of conscious, or semi-conscious thought he’d had in over thirty years,

_‘I need to find help.’_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Guess who's still hanging around after all this time...  
> -Alright. _Alright!_ I can hear my imaginary mob yelling at me, "But this isn't the end of the tales that Blade and the gang were telling us before!" Well shush, we'll get back to that, but for now the present time has it's own host of problems to be dealt with.


	11. Remember Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for violence

For the past year, he’d seen things. He had thought he was just crazy, or that it was just a side effect of the traumas he’d undergone during his firefighter training (or the end part of it, more rather), but the more he saw them, the more he was convinced that he was just crazy.  
No one else saw them. He was certain, because they could be inches from team members, and they wouldn’t bat an eye. He still wasn’t certain whether they were good things or bad ones - they didn’t seem to do much of anything to sway his judgement to one side or the other. They were just kind of...there.

Unmoving, unspeaking, unbreathing...but there.

Until today, he’d never thought that they could be anything more than ‘there’. Nothing had happened since he’d begun to see them, so he stopped worrying that it was a sign he was actually mental. He stopped noticing their existence, and in turn they seemed to stop existing as much.  
That is, until now.

As Dusty and Windlifter flew past the northern side of Piston Peak, something caught the younger aircraft’s eye; A glint of silvery-white, like a strewn paper or the inside foil of a chip bag, hurling towards them. _Towards,_ as in it was blowing against the wind’s current and that of their own powerful engines, growing larger and more focused as it neared.

And then Dusty realised it wasn’t a some _thing_ , but a some _one_.

Windlifter actually stopped mid-air, waiting for the thing to reach them. Not flinching, not turning and leaving, and certainly not unaware of its presence. Dusty, being a plane, couldn’t as well hover midair, but he circled back to watch the thing as it floated closer, eyes adjusting to see the faint outlines of a body.  
He felt so stupid that he hadn’t considered Windlifter, of _all_ aircraft, to know about them. He mentally bopped himself for not having gone to _him_ to ask about them - what they were, why they were, and if they were, well...what he came to think they were.

Ghosts.

He felt like he recognized this one, just from the general shape of it’s flowy, warped form. It was still for the moment, and as his eyes focused on the being he could make out a tail but no wings, so likely some form of rotorcraft. It’s front half was very rounded, not giving him a lot of defining features to guess from though. And he was a tiny thing, couldn’t have been much larger than himself, definitely a lighter build than Bla--

And then it hit him.

“Nick.” He said, catching the Sikorsky’s attention.

“You know him?” He asked.

“Of course, I- I mean, not while he was still...is that _really_...?”

“Yes.” Was the other’s quick reply. He suddenly turned his attention back to the silhouette, “ _Where is Blade?_ ”

Dusty couldn’t tell if he’d been given an answer, over the gush of wind between them and the static over their radios. He circled the two like a vulture, eyes glued to the faintly glowing frame, watching it begin to look down toward the forest floor. He could hear Windlifter give a deep sigh.

_‘Help…’_

Dusty couldn’t register the voice in his own hearing, unsure whether he actually heard it or if it came from his head. It echoed, yet it was clear-cut.

_‘I can’t..sense him anymore…’_

The hint of an accent hitting at his a’s and o’s was unmistakable.

_‘Gone…’_

“Wind..” Dusty said.

“Hm?”

“I think he’s..as confused as we are.”

“That’s...not _possible_.”

“What do you mean?” The orange and white plane asked. The older male looked up at him as he circled past again, and then back to the figure in front of him. After a moment’s silence, he sighed and began to drift off in another direction.  
“Follow me.” He instructed - meaning both, apparently, as the flickering ghost followed his lead. Dusty straightened back out of his circling,  
“Where are we going now?”  
“Where I can see if my hunch is correct…”

\-----

It was quiet. Too quiet. Even against the steady thrumming of his four rotors, Blade felt the air was uneasy. Tense, even, _waiting_. _‘Breath,’_ he coached himself, _‘You’ve done this before. Don’t lose yourself.’_ He hoped that Dusty was telling himself the same things. At least Windlifter was there to keep him calm. He always had a way of bringing a sense of stillness to an otherwise tense situation.

_‘Don’t let fear take hold of you.’_

_**BAM!!** _

“ _Auggh!_ ”

Searing hot pain stabbed into him, somewhere in front of his retardant tank and behind his chin, just barely missing his throat. He barely had the moment to think, but he knew - the bit of foreign metal remained lodged in his system.

_**BAM!!**_ Another gunshot - he missed by a fraction of an inch, the bullet nearly grazing across the air chief’s paint. He clenched his jaw tight - he needed to get _out_ of here. The static over his radio communication flickered to life, though the pain against his body had grown so blindingly agonizing he could barely rasp out a request.

“hh..-- _Mayd--_ ”

_**BAM!!!** _

Static.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -This chapter has a total of 911 words. I’m not joking. Pure serendipity. Could not have done that again if I tried. And I don’t want to add anything else because of that perfect number. But don’t fret that it was short - the next chapter will more than pick up the slack on that. Just y’all wait, here’s where we get _really_ dark...


	12. Oracles & Obstacles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here it is. Here's the big one.
> 
> **Warnings: Violence, swearing, and terrible, terrible things**
> 
> I will need to go back and make some *slight* changes to the descriptives of Dusty in my previous chapters, because I just noticed that here (and I think everywhere else but the first part) he is referred to as ORANGE and white, yet in chapter one I had made him to be in his RED and white livery - since he’s at the fire station. Makes more sense. But since that’s less familiar than his orange body, we’ll just go ahead and say he’s still orange. I dunno, I’ll come up with some alternative combined color scheme for the future. And Dusty does have his pontoons here..gah, I hate having to remember what the damn kid looks like all the time.
> 
> Also, this is a long chapter.

“I’m a _what_?” Dusty asked, dumbfounded. The young plane and the Sikorsky sat within a large clearing in the park, where a ranger’s station sat empty. The orange and white plane felt uneasy about being on the ground in the forest, where they knew an armed vehicle was still at large, but the green helicopter reassured that he would never come this far out and in plain sight - they were far closer to the Lodge now, and police were scouring every part of the enclosed treeline they could looking for their suspect.  
“An _oracle_. It’s a kind of seer.” Windlifter told him. He watched the younger male’s eyes flick between him and the patiently waiting figure of the ghost beside him - how he remained there was beyond him.  
“.. _How?_ ”  
“You said you could hear him, couldn’t you?”  
“I don’t know if that was really him, or that I’m just losing my mind! I’ve...been seeing these.. _things_ , since I woke up from my crash!”  
“A gift from the spirits,” he concluded with a nod. It all made sense now. “Only those who are taught to see them can, and those who can hear them are that which have met death for themselves.”  
“I...wait, _what_? What are you saying?”  
“You died after that crash,” The older male told him, taking his time over his next words, “Or nearly did. But you managed to come _back_. And now, you can see the others who have come to death, but are left on the earth.”  
“So...so ghosts?”  
“In a matter of speaking.”  
“And he..” - the orange and white plane shrugged a wingtip over in the ghost’s direction - “Have we confirmed that he..he _is_ -”  
“Nick. Yes.” Windlifter said, “He’s been around for a long time now.”  
When the crop duster looked back at him, he could hear his resounding requests. _‘Help...can’t sense him...gone…’_ He still echoed like he was far away, even though he was mere feet from the plane’s prop.  
“He doesn’t seem...like he’s really there though.” Dusty began to understand, watching the other’s incredible stillness even as the outline of his form wavered and warped like an illusion.  
“None of them truly are.” Windlifter told him,  
“You see ghosts aren’t what people often think they are. They’re still gone, they can’t live, they can’t learn or change the way they did when they were physically present. They’re the husks of their past, a collection of what memories they had before, stuck in between earth and the afterlife. Or rather, they _decided_ to remain here.”  
“How’d they do that?”  
“A vow. A vow of vengeance against another soul that remains alive...or a vow to protect them..” The Sikorsky looked to the glowing figure as well, a face of pity for the former helicopter becoming apparent.  
“Blade.” Dusty said, “He’s here because of Blade.”  
“It would seem that way.”  
_‘Gone…’_  
“But if he’s here for Blade, why is he _here_ instead, why is he...oh God…”  
“He isn’t dead.” Windlifter answered for him, already seeing the terror developing in the other’s core, “If he passed on, then Nick would have vanished too. When the living side of a vow goes as well, they both return to their afterlife. But you do have a point - even _I_ don’t know how he could be here and not with him.”  
“He said he can’t.. ‘Sense him’ anymore, he’s trying to ask for help.” Dusty said, “But...I don’t know what we can do, we don’t know where he is either!”  
“That’s very strange..” The other said, puzzled. “Spirits, especially protective ones, are always aware of their vow’s presence...something else is going on. We just don’t have all the pieces yet.”  
“How do we ‘get them’ then?”  
The green Sikorsky looked the young plane over, “I think the only one who can get the pieces to figure this out is..you.”

\-----

His landing wasn’t smooth. It was somewhere in the tier beside his crash-landing after the mine incident, though maybe not quite as rough or debilitating.  
It wasn’t until _after_ he’d landed that he was debilitated.

The base of his front landing gear ached and refused to hold weight, too close to his now pair of bullet wounds in his underside. He couldn’t tell which hoses busted, but he knew some had from the fluid that had begun to drip down from the front gear. Hydraulics maybe, he wasn’t sure.  
Gritting his teeth, he tried to piece together his surroundings. He hated being here, but he didn’t feel safe going up in the air again - not that he thought he’d have the energy to do so in his condition anyways. He’d managed to find a clearing just large enough to land in, and far enough from the shooter that he had time to get backup. He was on the other side of the river, and that water was fast - as he and the SEAT learned the hard way.  
His rotors hadn’t even spun down all the way before he heard a rustle in the woods behind him. Or he thought he did, maybe it was just from the wind stirred up from the blades. And he could barely turn his head, from the pain in it that travelled across most of his front. January ice peered into the thicket - and flickering golden embers stared back.

He didn’t have to rush - the other wasn’t going anywhere. The two eyes remained locked in a defensive glare as the stranger rolled smoothly out into the clearing.  
He didn’t match the shooter’s description, but that was only a minor relief on top of a greater concern. He was a fairly young car, a silver-white Ford Focus. How he managed to remain so well hidden was beyond the helicopter, but maybe his eyes were going. The smaller vehicle only stopped when he was about a foot from the chopper’s nose, and only once he picked up on the feral growl rising in his engines.  
“As I live and breathe..” He commented, gazing over the Agustawestland’s front - yes, he knew who he was under that firefighter’s paint. Blade narrowed his eyes at the intruder. He didn’t have reason yet to need to defend himself, but he had a damn good instinct that this wasn’t about to be a friendly get-together. And he was already stuck in the low ground.  
“I’m not here to entertain an audience.” He growled.  
“Yes, I’m sure you must have a _very_ busy schedule,...” The other replied coolly, as though it were playful banter, “But I’m afraid you’re needed elsewhere. Very important deed, you see...”  
In the midst of his short introduction, the red and white helicopter suddenly tore his vision away from the Ford to his left, and then to the right...two, if not three other vehicles showed up from out of the darkness of the forest, mostly in darker paint, and he was suddenly surrounded.  
“And we shan’t keep the customer waiting.”

As if on cue, the figure to his left charged forward in attack; Blade found strength again in his front landing gear, enough to turn and sink his teeth into the vehicle’s front fender, swinging him off towards the Ford. He dodged, damn it.  
But he hadn’t realized the following ambush at his tail, hadn’t even known someone was really back there, though he was sure one would be. But as he tried to gather the force to fling him off too, the third - from his right side - hit him in the flank, causing him to bare down on the ground and keep from tipping over. Hard as he was _to_ tip, once he did he’d be out for the count.  
The third found it hard to get any purchase on the other’s broad sides, only managing to bite down to the base of his tail boom - and by then, he went off with the other being swung off into the dirt. There, that was the end of it...right?

Wrong.

Another force - a backup buff if you will - assaulted the helicopter before he could even catch his breath; Canines like daggers sank into the back of his helm. He was _pulling_ rather than pushing the other down, and though Blade pulled back hard and held his stance, he could feel the sharp teeth cutting long marks down the length of his side, painfully slow.  
The assaulter readjusted to bite further up, closer to the front of Blade’s rotor hub, where he’d have the most leverage. The dude had to be another aircraft, as far up as the fucker could reach, and sure enough as Blade too readjusted to pull back, he glanced down to see one of the long black wings of his attacker.  
He would have won the pulling match, knowing the other’s fangs could only stay on him for so long before they slid down, pulling the sheet metal up in sharp, jagged lines, but he hadn’t anticipated the others would be up again so soon. Suddenly he was fighting against a plane pulling on one side _and_ a pair of vehicles pushing on the other.  
Grunting, he could feel his landing gear starting to give. He didn’t have it in him to keep his front up, when the pain of his previous afflictions multiplied in intensity. It held on for another shaky, wobbly moment, before-

_Snap!_

The whole front of the wheel broke off under the pressure, his center of gravity suddenly lurching forward as his nose went into the dirt. And that gave the airplane just enough time to sprint out of the way before the others slammed him into the ground - on his side, finished.  
One of his four rotors snapped in the process, another vaguely damaged but remaining. The impact of his helm hitting the floor, coupled with his changed vision and perspective, sent the forest reeling in a blur of dark colors. The only thing he could scarcely make out was the blob of white that was floating back towards him.  
“Really not your best moment…” the blob insulted him, “Hurry up with it, James! This place is crawling with armed forces, so we gotta be fucking fast.”  
Then the white blob moved out of his peripheral vision, and the one thing that he had to be visually anchored to was gone. Everything hurt, to the point he was only vaguely aware that something had started to tug against his tail boom, and around his rotor hub. It wasn’t a sharp, searing pain like the plane’s fangs, but a broad pull, like a rope or a cable. He started to move, not under his own power, being dragged by his tail back into the woods. He hoped wherever they were going wouldn’t be far - he could already feel the scratches and dents among other various wounds littering his left side. The trail he made in the dirt, he noticed, was being covered up by another figure, though he couldn’t see how.  
The group’s conversations were hard to make out over the constant ringing in his ears. They sounded like orders, but from who? And _why_?

“Oh fuck..” The helicopter breathed, as it suddenly came to his attention where they were. He hadn’t recognized exactly _where_ he’d landed when he did - in too great of sudden pain to really notice - but he knew, and now knew that _they_ knew that they weren’t thirty feet from the mines. The same mines he and Dusty ended up in. By the same field he crashed in over a year ago. If it didn’t reek of irony, he didn’t know what would.  
His attempt at fighting back was feeble at best. Landing gear scrambling for purchase on the ground, he just didn’t have enough angle to even get one tire against the forest floor. But the closer he felt himself being dragged, the higher his anxiety suddenly spiked. Fighting for his life, he thrashed and yanked at the chains holding him with whatever strength he could muster, and still he went. Went back to pain and misery, back to the burning, claustrophobic walls of the mine shaft. Back to death, and not just to visit.  
“Here’s fine.” He heard the Ford say. The chains fell slack, and soon they were removed completely - no need to hold him down, it seemed he held _himself_ down.  
“Let’s just get this over with so we can get out of here. Lenny!” A dark green pittie the helicopter hadn’t seen before suddenly seemed to appear, going around the chopper’s front to stop under his chin, where they seemed to carefully eye the bullet wounds. His gaze then seemed to shift downwards, across the fire boss’s tank to the vague direction of his tail.  
“The fuck are you..hey, HEY!!” The Agustawestland suddenly regained his voice as the forklift had begun to unhook the retardant tank from his underside, roughly yanking out whatever sections he seemed to feel would be too time-consuming to unhook the right away, “What the _fuck_ do you think you’re doing!?”  
“Jake, deal with him..” The forklift ordered, as he pulled off the final bolt of the other’s tank and flung it off to the corner somewhere. It wasn’t important, apparently. Instead, he pulled out a tool from his side, and once he had it hooked up, the helicopter realized with a wave of ice-cold dread what it was about to be for.  
“Get your filthy forks _off_ of me, you-m-Mhhph!!”  
It would seem ‘Jake’ - being one of the three Blade had fought with earlier - finally did his job, stuffing a God-knows-where-it’s-been cloth practically down the chopper’s throat. He bit down hard on the rag, and not just because he didn’t like it being there - every system in his body suddenly went into overdrive, mind-numbingly tense as he went full-on panic. He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, and a gang of unfriendly strangers were spectating as an unfriendly pittie went at his underside with a welding torch.  
The pittie was obviously a skilled mechanic - not only did he have a clean line cut down the length of the chopper’s stomach, but in that line he found - and cut - every fluid-based wire he could find within it. They weren’t all completely torn out, either - they were tiny cuts, slits in the rubber of the hose designed to cause slow but steady leaks, and making it a hard find-me-if-you-can game to patch up again, especially when there were so many.  
“Are you _done_ yet?” The Ford asked impatiently, watching the forklift getting lost in concentration, whilst his patient choked on his rag mid-hyperventilation. It wasn’t until he actually bumped the pittie to get his attention - and a nice death glare - that they finally got the message and finished up.  
Blade vaguely remembered the group packing up again to leave. They didn’t taunt him or anything, but they also didn’t take out the rag and they didn’t get him back on his landing gear - not that it would have held him up very well anyways. Nope, their plan, as he began to realize, was to get him out, on the ground, and on his side to cut open and leave to die.  
And it was meant to be a slow death. The many cuts in the hoses and the line cut down his belly left him to slowly bleed out - he knew as much that he’d only have a few hours at best. And he had no radio communication, not even for so much as an S-O-S.

And no one even knew what happened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright y’all repeat after me! _I am a terrible person, I am a terrible person, I am a terrible person, I am a terrible person, I am a terrible person…_ [say “you are” instead though, because I mean me not you...unless you’re torturing Blade too.]


	13. Bleeding Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More bad happenings because I am evil...

It was close to midnight now. Dusty and Windlifter had concluded that there was no point in questioning things any further until they could find their chief. It was a dead end until then anyways.  
They scoured every inch of the park. Other park rangers, police forces, and anyone else they could get were contacted, told to stay on the lookout. Both he _and_ the runoff shooter were still out of sight, and until one or the other could be found they didn’t dare risk reopening the park.  
Everyone on base was exhausted, nerves on end, minds wrought with terrible possibilities. The two youngest planes sat tiredly at the side of the runway, between shifts and scarcely even able to stay awake. Windlifter was the only one still out for now, and even he knew he couldn’t be out there forever. Sooner or later he’d have to call it, and then they’d have to stop for the night.  
“It just doesn’t add up,” Drip commented, sitting with Dynamite and the two airplanes with a round of oil cans, “How could he just..‘poof’? It’s not like him at all.”  
“I shudder to think what could’ve happened…” Dipper said.  
Dusty remained silent. He had a better clue than anyone did, but as per Windlifter’s request, he opted not to share it with anyone. At least, not yet.  
Ghosts - while fairly normal to see roaming around - weren’t always acknowledged by others. And in some ways that was a good thing - it kept many from becoming hopelessly attached to them, or from trying to delve too deeply into what they were and how they were.  
Blade didn’t seem to know about Nick’s ghost. At least, that’s what the Sikorsky had since come to realize. Though when he noticed him first he wanted to say something about it, he knew it was an unwise decision. Blade didn’t _need_ to know - it would have just tormented him to learn that he, in a manner of speaking, still existed.  
Dusty, however, was different. He wasn’t told that they existed, he saw it for himself suddenly. Keeping that much from the other’s knowledge had become easier now, especially with the relief that they weren’t all out for blood - though, as the green chopper reminded him, vows of vengeance often led to more ‘active’ spirits. What kept him on edge, however, was the gleaming figure that wouldn’t leave his side.  
He knew he was the only one in the group that could see Nick, yet it didn’t ease his mind any, knowing he was still here, still yearning for help, for someone to find his other half. He had remained glued to the crop duster turned firefighter’s side all evening, even more so than Windlifter’s.  
He didn’t know how he could help. He didn’t know how he should even try to. He wanted to wait for Windlifter to come back, now his only guide in this strange new world of glimmering wisps of the deceased yet remained souls of the earth.

What could they do now but wait?

\-----

The night was cold, but at least the cavern shielded the immobilized helicopter from the wind. It did leave a whistling sound cutting across the mine’s opening, however, one among a trove of nighttime sounds the other clung to for reassurance that he was still here, something to remain tied to reality with.  
He made countless mental notes of his surroundings. It was all he could do to stay awake and calm. One, two, three, four, five visible nails in the low wooden beam over his head - the sixth either having fallen out or been rusted up by the weather. Six visible trees had buds growing on them, the rest seemingly not. One tree off to the side was split down the center of it’s trunk - lightning perhaps. He wondered if it would survive the afflictions, or if it would end up as deadwood. He also wondered if _he_ would survive them either.  
He tried not to struggle to get up again. Not only did the act of fighting waste now precious energy, it coaxed the fluid in his lines to seep ever further, lessening his chances that someone might show up before it was too late. And even if he did manage to right himself, a whole slew of problems would inflict him then. His front landing gear was still broken, and being upright would - again - invite the flow of hydraulic fluid out, draining him completely of his energy. No, he had to sit, impatiently patient, waiting for someone to stumble across the mineshaft and be able to get help.

What could he do now but wait?

\-----

Windlifter was just as fatigued as everyone else when he touched back down onto the tarmac - if not more so. It was nearly three in the morning before he’d come back, and everyone but Dusty and Maru had since gone to their hangars.  
The young racer looked up hopefully at the Sikorsky; His worn down gaze said it all.

Nothing.

“We have to keep looking!”  
“We’ve done everything we can for today, Dusty.” The green chopper said, his tone hoarse and low. The orange and white plane looked riled up, like he wanted to fight back against his words, but the fire in his eyes flickered out again, and he sunk back down on his pontoons.  
“The Smokejumpers agreed to go out again at daylight,” Maru said, appearing from the now closed doors of his garage, “They can scout in the areas you can’t.” He locked the front latch with a heavy clunk, and waved a farewell as he went off to get what little fragments of sleep he could.  
When the mechanic had gone, Dusty looked back to the Sikorsky tiredly. He was in charge now until Blade could be found, but that also meant Dusty was the most qualified - by default of stations - to being _his_ second in command. The older male seemed to understand this, regarding the plane with a respectable gaze. But it didn’t change the situation.  
“Rest now,” He told him, “there’s nothing more we can do until daylight.”  
Not giving him the time to reply, the elder rolled off towards his own hangar, a feeling of defeat looming over his features. Dusty watched him go, waiting until he, the last of their team, shut his hangar doors for the night.  
Quietly, he went off towards the runway. His stubbornness cost him a lot in his life so far, but he’d be damned before he gave up trying to fight for someone _else’s_ life. It’s time he repaid the air boss for saving him.


	14. To Be Enough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Retitled / Original: “Grieving Heart”]  
> Written out of chapter order during production because I had forgotten I wanted to add this. This is more like a half a chapter, half a vent-type piece. But not an anger vent. A life vent, and an acceptance vent.  
> And now I have officially cried over my own fanfiction.

The hours dragged on through the night like never before. Blade tried to focus on anything that wasn’t the slow, painful spiral towards death, but one could only do so much in his state.  
It wasn’t the most painful thing ever, which he was thankful for. His crash had been much worse, a fall on top of serious burns that left the plating of his flank tender and irritated for months afterwards. _If_ he could get help soon, he was sure he would be okay.  
But therein lay the problem. Did they know? Were they looking? And would they think, of all places, to look _here_? The longer the evening wore on, the less of a chance he felt he had.  
He might just die here. Drug into a mine shaft and cut open, and left to just bleed out. It was a familiar feeling to him actually - the wet yet warm trickle of fluid from his open wounds, the slowly setting fog in the corners of his vision. But the last time had not been caused by another.

It wasn’t even accidental.

\-----

It was years ago, decades even, when it happened. He had believed everything was fine then, nothing could stand in his way any longer; He was finally out of the dark.  
For a time, all was well. He was sleeping again, eating again, he and Windlifter had seemed to settle into an easy friendship, and he’d really begun to excel in his career. More than they thought he would. He even felt ready to apply for battalion chief, ready to prove that he could be enough.  
And then the storm hit. Just as Windlifter had thus predicted, the future came to be the present; Another important letter in the mailbox. Closely following, a visit from a few investigators.  
There were copious amounts of questions. Asks for better clarification, better description. Thoughts. Opinions. And all the while, he had to keep his intimate side of his relationship with Nick a secret. He didn’t want others poking through those private times.  
Blade had already spent the last two and a half years trying to take every detail of CHoPs that he possessed _out_ of his memory, and here he was having to rebuild it again, to remember that time before. That time when everything was okay. When the world was his to claim.  
And he had to remember the first breaths into the world after.

There were words in his mind that night. No manner of soothing the rest of the team offered would hold them back, and once he was in the silence of his own hangar again, it rained. It _poured_.

In school...

_Why are you always so quiet?_

_What’s up with you?_

On the set...

_Learn to take a joke!_

_Don’t be so hard on yourself!_

And every landmark in between.

_It’s not a big deal._

_Are you even paying attention?_

_It’s just not working out._

_You couldn’t change anything._

_**You just weren’t enough.** _

Enough. He wasn’t enough.

He knew he spent two years in denial, and could have spent much less if he’d only realized it. He knew his team cared - but where did that care originate? Did they _pity_ him? And Windlifter was always there, but even he could only walk him so far.  
He had rebuilt his before-world, where life felt perfect until the day it wasn’t. And that night, more than any other since Nick had left him,he wanted to go home. He wanted to go back to that place where he was happy, where he didn’t feel broken, where he never thought twice about his actions, and that of the ones around him. He wanted to go back to that innocent world, naive and carefree, with him.

_“Everything is different now..”_ That was the first realization that came to him the day after the accident, the morning after he’d gone and wasted himself well beyond any sane man’s limits.  
It wasn’t just the fact that he was dead. That wasn’t the only thing that had killed him inside. What killed him then was knowing that his life had been taken from him, young, the thread of his existence on this earth…seared.  
He would never have closure on this part of his life. Always, for the rest of whatever time remained to him, he would remember this. And he could never tell him the things he hadn’t before. There would never be any resolution at the end of this frayed memory.  
And that’s what killed him.

That’s why he did it that night.

He knew they would care. He knew they would hurt. But their pain would only be temporary, they weren’t so close as to be burned by his flames when he went. In a way, he would be saving them - saving them from a worser fate. From his own fate, psyche slowly crumbling underneath him, until his inevitable fall into the canyon he had dug out for himself.  
He wanted to go home. He wanted to forget about pain. He wanted to be without the spiraling thoughts that no one was ever who they said they were, no one was ever going to think he was enough. He would never be enough.

He wouldn’t have to care about being enough anymore.

\-----

Things were different now. It took him many more horrific attempts after that before he could hold himself up again, and longer still to tell himself “Yes. I am worth it to me. I am enough.”  
The fight to be able to tell himself that persisted every day.

But here, lying helpless on the ground, having been shot and mauled, chained and drug to a cave, and gagged and cut open to bleed to death...here, he didn’t _want_ to die anymore.  
Dusty couldn’t be left with his fate.

It burned him up inside, knowing he would let him down. He would let him suffer. He saw himself and more in the young plane, his own type of insecurities, and the struggles to be enough for others every day. But he didn’t know yet.  
_‘Give me this one chance,’_ he prayed, _‘Let me be there to remind him of this; he **is** enough.’_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I fight with myself to accept what I can’t resolve. Recent times and life events have left me with damage I can’t repair. It’s a struggle on myself to get up in the morning and say _yes, you ARE enough. Because you’re you, and ‘you’ is enough._ Being enough isn’t defined by what people paint you as; Emotional; Overanalytical; Clingy; Obsessive; or hypocritical.
> 
> You are not defined by another’s opinions. To be enough is not determined by _their_ thoughts or depictions.
> 
> Enough is what you _are_ , here and now. Every step of your life is a fight to be more, but you - yes, you, as-you-are you - **are enough**.
> 
> We are enough.
> 
> **I am enough.**
> 
> Because I’m not perfect. I’m clearly flawed. I’m still learning about myself, every day. And that will never change, and learning and changing never stops. And finally, I can say, I can _believe_ that that’s okay.  
> We’re always trying. And that’s always enough.


	15. When Walking A Tightrope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hey-hooo! So this will be the last of my build-up of chapters over my little hiatus, so after this no more 2-day uploads and back to the I'll-get-to-it-when-I-get-to-it schedule.  
> FINALLY, I'm done torturing you people with waiting, and we actually get an outcome of sorts here. But as always, there is still more to happen in the coming chapters. ;P

The base was alive again by the early dawn. The Smokejumpers suited up and headed out, and over a second cup of coffee, Windlifter made a strategy for the search party to rotate shifts. There was just one problem - _another_ one of them was missing. Namely, a certain orange and white air tractor.  
“Have you seen Dusty?” The chopper asked Maru, hoping he’d seen them that morning.  
“No, not since last night,” he said, “And I _bet_ you I can guess where he’s at...”  
“I was afraid of that…” The rotorcraft sighed.  
“Did you really expect anything else outta that kid?”

\-----

Dusty’s engines were boiling; he’d been running it hard all morning, re-scouring every hill and valley across the V6 Valley. He trailed back and forth through Augerin Canyon, looking for _anything_ \- red paint, a black chevron, a wheel…  
The white Hughes followed him, completely silent as he wisped past with the other. Dusty clung to the hope that maybe they worked like magnets - that if one was close enough to the other, they’d be back together again in no time.  
As he came back around to Anchor Lake for the upteenth time, he headed upstream near Rail Ridge. He recognized the falls in front of him - they’d since cleared the fallen trees and debris in the river, enough that he could clearly find no helicopter along the banks. Again.  
There was a clearing off to starboard. He recognized the barren grounds he revisualized often at night, watching the air boss go down again, but would never get back up. A strewn rotor blade still lay in the ground, glinting off the sun. Strange, he thought the Smokejumpers had cleaned the place up after that crash...unless…  
Not hesitating in the slightest, he turned and made a lineup to land right through that clearing. He hit the ground with a slight bounce, not paying attention enough to make a smoother landing. He glanced over the rotor lying in the ground, among other shards of metal.

Red metal.

He found a trail cut through the woods toward the mine. It didn’t look new from the ground, but the brush broken down through it seemed fresh. It was proof enough.  
“Blade?” He called through the forest, hoping for something, some kind of answer, something to reassure him that he was okay…

_‘Blade!’_

He could hear the voice cut through the surroundings, clearer than the buzzing that waned in and out of his hearing. Tired, but curious, the Agustawestland slowly creaked an eye open. As before, the scenery was still rocking and swirling like a ship in a storm, but something was definitely different. A different shape materialized in front of him, it’s colors offsetting and bright against the desaturated landscape. It grew closer, and suddenly he recognized the winged shape of the SEAT.  
He was saying something to him, but he couldn’t focus. Weird lights kept popping in front of his vision, and he couldn’t keep his eyes focused on the other’s.

“N-no, no don’t-- just try to stay awake Blade,” The crop duster fretted, watching the other start to drift out of consciousness again, eyes rolling back with a groan, “just try to stay awake, just keep your eyes open..I’m here. We’re here.” ‘We’re’ as in not just the backup that was on the way; Nick had settled down at the helicopter’s top side, nose pressed against the top of his helm protectively. He seemed to regain his sense of the other, at least. Now he could only hope that whatever he was doing now was keeping him alive.  
“ _Just stay awake…_ ”

Whirring helicopter blades followed soon after. Familiar voices filled the space. Dusty remained at his side, as the familiar stroke of Maru’s tine on his cheek reassured him enough not to spook when he’d started to access the damage. If he didn’t get at least some of the lines patched up, he’d never make the flight home. He had lost around 40% of his fluids, the hydraulics and fuel lines seeping down the open wound into a sizable puddle under him.  
Duct tape was the mechanic’s greatest asset times like this. He didn’t need a complete fix, but it had to hold for long enough to survive the helicopter resting upright in the sling back to the base. Enough to be able to shove a few towels into the torn crease and pray it kept him alive long enough.  
“Will you be able to get back in time?” Dusty asked, looking over Maru’s front as he secured the last hook onto the sling. The three of them - Maru, Dusty and Windlifter combined - had been able to pull the Agustawestland back out into the open far enough to strap him into a proper sling for Wind to take him back to the base.  
“One of the park rangers is giving me a ride back towards the lodge, and Cabbie’s already landed. And if I’m not, Patch and Dynamite know how to set him up, and that should be enough time to get back.” His tines were still shaking, either from the situation in front of him or the aftershocks of having just jumped out of a plane like a Smokejumper himself. It was the fastest way to a scene.  
“What if something goes wrong?” the little plane worried.  
“You know where the IV is, and the generator..just bottom line, make sure he stays conscious enough, and keep the towels there. I’ll get to them once I’m back.” The mechanic moved to face the helicopter in the sling, breathing shallow but there all the same.  
“You stay alive now, ya hear?” He told him. Blade gave only a vague indication that he heard him, though his throated response was entirely unintelligible.  
Maru waved a fork up at the Sikorsky above them, giving him the all clear. Dusty stood by to ensure they made it off the ground safely, whilst the mechanic was already off to see the park ranger on standby, in a race back to the fire base.  
This felt sickeningly like last July. Only somehow worse, amplified not by the severity of his injuries - although it got points for it - but by the fact that this _wasn’t_ a freak accident. This wasn’t the result of his own stubbornness or mistakes that cost him. Someone, of whom they didn’t yet know the intention behind, did this. Maru was certain of it, from the rag they’d since pulled from his mouth and the carefully opened and cut wounds - the work of a clearly skilled mechanic. No ‘accident’ would have led to all this.  
Dusty followed closely behind the Sikorsky once they’d both taken off towards the base. He watched Nick trail closer still to them, mere feet away from the dangling chopper. He hoped, as he watched his chief’s unmoving form, that he was still conscious, still breathing, still alive.  
His body was wracked with exhaustion, shaking and trembling now as he had never done before. He didn’t dare consider sleep, even as his landing gear protested greatly from under him, his entire body dragging heavily, fighting to stay upright. Blade came before sleep did - and until he knew he would be alright, he wasn’t going anywhere.  
Maru showed up not a minute after they had Blade back on the ground. He immediately called to have the chopper back onto his side to work on, once he’d taken another assessment of the damage. The towels were soaked all the way through by now, but at least they held. At least he wasn’t dead yet.  
It wasn’t normal or natural for any heli to be on their sides, especially not for so long. It would definitely come back to bite them both later, having to let his body slowly adjust his equilibrium again, and the tedious work that went into adjusting that finite perception. But for now, he needed to patch up the hoses quickly and effectively, without the air boss draining out in the middle of it.  
It was a long process, and Dusty sat watching from just outside the hangar, his face never losing that gloomy yet distantly hopeful expression. And he looked _tired_.  
Windlifter had apparently had enough of the young male trying to force himself awake while the mechanic worked. He had whispered something to Dipper behind the air tractor’s back, and not a minute later she was offering him a tea. _‘A rather special tea…’_ The forklift thought. He watched the SEAT protest at first, but once it had sat in front of him for a while, he took a few experimental sips...and then sucked the whole thing down.  
And then the Sikorsky was guiding the already half-asleep crop duster to some decent enough sleeping quarters. He came back to the shed to let the mechanic know that he may be out for…“a while”.  
“What did you have her put in that tea??” Maru asked, pulling down a box of various hoses.  
“Nothing,” Windlifter admitted, “It was a simple green tea. I knew it would be enough to get him to consider sleeping.”  
“Hm, kid must’ve been _really_ tired…”  
“How is he then?” Windlifter asked, changing their topic back to the darker situation at hand.  
“..relatively steady.” He answered, “I’ve gotten most of the hoses replaced, but we need to get some fluid back in him. He lost a damn lot, I have no idea how long he was out there…”  
The dark green helicopter looked over at Blade - he had finally been allowed to give in to sleep, though he looked more motionless than ever before.  
“You’re not worried about him being able to rest now?”  
“I’ve got him on the monitors. He needs to anyways, he’s got a long hard road to recovery.”  
Without looking over at him, he could hear the relief in the larger male’s sigh. _He would be okay._  
But even once he was back to himself again, they weren’t out of the woods yet. They needed answers. And being so sudden, and just from the looks of his situation, getting the story out of him might be harder than they anticipated. Even the often prophet-like wisdom giver was at a loss. There were no obvious connections, no reasons or logic that could have been traced. Either some terrible vehicles just wanted to have some fun at someone else’s expense, or this had to do with matters Blade had never since revealed to the others. They didn’t know _everything_ , after all.  
It was slowly going towards noon. Dusty was half-dead in his own hangar, the first sleep he’d had in likely days. The others, all but the Smokejumpers, were all finally allowed to relax again on the base, somewhat. Yes, he would be okay. They had found him and gotten him home before it was too late, and that alone was a relief across every member on the base.  
Cabbie seemed mildly irritated though, despite the rescue. He hadn’t said anything, but the look on his face and his habit of pacing said it all. He was trying to figure out the puzzle, with only one treadful of the hundreds of pieces needed to complete it. There was nothing he could do with it now, not until they had more information - this all boiled down to another waiting game. And it was infuriating.  
Though not as fed up with it all it seemed, the Smokejumpers were on a similar page. The five of them were spread out across the park, working with other police forces and trying to gather any new information they could. No one could yet prove the connection between the shooter still at large and Blade’s situation, though the coincidental times between them was definitely concerning. Everything pooled back to Blade; They needed _his_ side of the story before they could understand any more. At best, that would be a couple days still.  
And then Windlifter remembered Dusty; More specifically, he’d learned that his suspicions about him were in fact correct - he possessed not just the sight of the dead, but he could hear them, he could communicate with them on a level even he was never able to reach. He looked back over to the hangar where Blade lay; Nick had left. He wasn’t in his line of sight, so there was only one other logical place he could have been.  
And he was surely headed for the REM cycle of his sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Important for me to note this, so I kind of can’t do effective research in the act of bleeding out. Why? Because I have discovered that I have hemophobia, a fear of blood, and/or trypanophobia - which is needles. That in and of itself wouldn’t be so bad, if it didn’t _also_ cause ‘vasovagal syncope’ (I looked it up), so in a nutshell the idea of talking about blood makes me feel weak and dizzy and very faint. This is actually a thing! And it sucks! So, I’m sorry if some of the facts behind this are incorrect or loosely constructed, but I can’t very well do effective research when reading an article about what happens when the body bleeds out is enough to make my hands feel like they’re gonna fall off. Just about everything presented here is guesswork!  
>  -REM stands for “rapid eye movement” for the un-ed-u-ma-cat-ed. It’s the part of your sleep cycle where dreams happen - although _technically_ dreams happen later or towards the end of that cycle. Also it’s weiiiird.


	16. Chasing A White Rabbit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm tired and want to go to bed but I'll post this now for y'all. Trippy dreams n' predictable shit, don't mind me...

Dusty was well aware that his history of dreams were pretty out-there, and kinda trippy at best. He never knew why, but dreams were dreams he supposed. So it surprised him then, when he’d woken up and _realized_ that he was dreaming, how strangely _not_ strange it was.  
It felt less like a dream and more like a memory, though not one he ever remembered. He didn’t even think it was his to begin with, though it appeared that if it was, he would have remembered it vaguely.  
It was extremely bright out, even for a regular cloudless day in Minnesota. But maybe that was because this looked nothing like Minnesota. The landscape he sat overlooking was barren, sandy and reddish-orange, where tufts of sage green grasses and tough cacti fought to stay alive in.  
He sat atop a small cliff overlooking the area, noting the airplanes and the trails of clouds they left behind as they flew overhead, going out beyond the horizons of this empty place.  
He wasn’t alone. Antonio, a Hughes OH-6 Cayuse, stood beside him. He sat back on his skids, staring out into the heat waves that rose up from the ends of the desert.  
“Why don’t we just leave?” He asked, “Just tear out of this place with what we have right now, land a gig in the big city, we’ll split a rent somewhere...we could do it!”  
“Yeah, we could…” He answered plainly, “But how would the others feel? We can’t just leave them here.”  
“You don’t have to, man,” The sage green helicopter turned to face him, “LA’s a big-ass place, and if we land a nice enough gig in it, we could move everyone out there too! It wouldn’t take long, especially not with you around, dude you can make a fucking _fortune_ out of a stuntsman career!”  
“I dunno, Toni, I jus’...there’s nothin’ I can do yet no one else has already tried. If I’m gonna make a living out of this, I’ve gotta find something no one else has ever seen before, something those guys will remember.”  
The OH-6 turned back to the landscape, digging his skid through the dirt as he thought.  
“I dunno, I don’t do the crazy twists and flips and stuff you do-”  
“I can’t do a full flip Toni, you idiot.”  
“Why not?”  
He looked back over at the helicopter, dumbfounded, “Wh-I-- _you’re a freaking helo and you don’t know why?_ ” Antonio pondered again for a moment.  
“Oooh, the rotor thing. It flexes and hits the tail…”  
“And then you’re basically fucked.”  
“Riiight…”  
“...but man I wish I could…” He admits suddenly. All his life, he’d done the things others said he couldn’t, proving to himself and to them that he was more than they thought. It always made mama nervous, of course, watching her boy trying to perform stunts rarely - if ever - done by helios, but he did it anyway. And he pulled it off. Just when he thought he had dead-ended his career path, a new door opened up, and he was determined to take it.

Later that night, as the sun went down and the Arizona town’s palette went from dusty oranges to cool blues and purples, he went back to mull the idea over in his head. What if he _could_ pull a full loop off? He’d need to modify some things, find a way to avoid the amount of risk, but surely, it could be done…

It took weeks. Months even, before he got it right. He would get closer and closer every time, tipping back just a little bit farther before he’d chicken out again, until he finally chanced it enough to pull back, hoping against all hope that his modifications were enough.  
The first time wasn’t the scariest - he just got lucky that he survived. The _second_ time, he had to remember how to recreate the first. He pulled back until the ground came up from the top of his vision instead of the bottom, until he started to pull back and down, making a spiral out of his drop until he’d climbed back into a horizontal. The sheer adrenaline that rushed through his body every time kept him hungering for more, to flip until he was dizzy, until finally he came in for the day, tired but satisfied.  
One such turn-in for the evening was most unexpected indeed. He was stopped by a car, about in his 30s or so, who seemed extremely taken aback at his performance.  
“How did..How did you do that?” He stammered, confusedly fascinated.  
“Ahh trade secret,” He blocked, “Can’t say.”  
“Could you do it again?”  
“Sure.” He shrugged, “I’ve been getting the hang of it. And I can do other stuff, rolls and things..”  
The Dodge Ramcharger in front of him looked utterly astonished, asking the kid any questions he could think of, impressed over and over again at every simple-sounding answer.  
“Young man, I really think you could make a lively career out of this talent,” He said, “I’ll tell you what - me and a pal have a gig going on out of town, it’s a big role to fill but you could make for a fantastic stuntsman! Just give us a call, we start our production in about two months.”  
“A movie?” He asked, glancing over at the car’s business card.  
“Television show,” he answered, “We’re taking action where it’s never gone before!”  
“You know…” He said, “I’ve been looking to get an acting role mainly, not just in stunting - although that’s definitely a bonus.”  
“Heh, I like your style kid,” the Ramcharger said, “Come pay us a visit, or just give us a call, maybe we’ll set you up with a spot in casting! What’s your name anyways, kid?”  
“Lopez,” He said, “Nicolas Francis Lopez, but everyone just calls me Nick.”  
“Good to know,” he said, “I hope to see you around then, Nick!”

It would seem the pickup left as soon as he’d emerged, leaving the helicopter alone in the backyard of Arizona, as the red sun setted over the desert. He looked back down at the card - they were casting in the Los Angeles region. Antonio would either be stoked or livid - and he wasn’t sure if he was ready to tell him just yet.  
Maybe he didn’t have to.

\-----

_CLANK!_

“What the-!?” The young air racer was suddenly startled awake at the audible crash from outside his hangar door. He looked up in just enough time to see Dipper’s eyes duck back under the window. She must’ve tripped over a piece of leftover paneling laying against the building.  
Before she could duck out of there, however, the crop duster came out to question her - though not for his rude awakening.  
“I need to find Windlifter, have you seen him anywhere?” He asked.  
The Super Scooper blinked back at him emptily, “Okay that’s definitely _not_ one of the top three questions I thought you were going to ask me...which were either ‘How’s Blade?’, ‘Why did you wake me up?’ and ‘Will you marry me?’ - but that’s beside the point. Uhh, I don’t know where Windy went off to. Probably either in his hangar or out looking for spotfires since, you know, he’s in charge right now!” She said with a chuckle, “Kinda obvious.”  
“Thanks. And uh..well, how _is_ Blade actually?” Dusty asked. He’d learned to just roll with the punches - or well, Dipper’s nonsenses.  
“Same old same old. Well, ‘same old’ as in he’s still the same as he was this morning. He hasn’t really done much. I tried watching for him for a little while - _reeeally_ boring by the way, let me tell you - and he stirred a _little_ bit, but then he just went back to being almost dead. He’s not in a coma though, I don’t think, just kinda, you know, out of it.”  
“Okay, thank you.”  
“Any time, sweet potato!”

Well there’s a new one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes:  
>  -Nicolas “Francis” Lopez - yes I took the name of the actual CHiPs character and put it in there as a little nod to the show...which I still have to watch. Now, I want to stress this, MY story of Nick is not the same as either Ponch’s or Estrada’s, it’s his own. There will be nods and things where I can fit ‘em, but otherwise he has his own tale to tell.


	17. Puzzle Pieces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It only gets stranger from here…
> 
> (Oh God there’s so many italics…)

It wasn’t unlike Windlifter to go off from the base randomly. They were less often in times when tension hung in the air, sticking like humidity to the team members. For that reason, however, it seemed off for him to have left base while Blade was still in recovery. Granted, Maru had confirmed he was improving quickly, and should be back on his tires soon enough, but everyone - air tractor included - was chomping on the bit for more information. But now Dusty had a new problem - or else an incredible clue that only the likes of the wise native could tell the meaning of.  
Nick - or rather, his ghost - didn’t seem to be around anywhere. He wasn’t glinting from the garage doors where Blade was, and he hadn’t seen him in or around his own hangar - though he couldn’t blame him for trying to stay more than a rotor’s length from Dipper. His next guess had to be Windlifter - since he’d even seen the glowing orb-like shapes of light, he’d noticed his, more unnaturally bright than some of the others, had always been in the same space of one of the two choppers. Great, now he had _two_ whimsical creatures to find.  
Strangely enough, he thought he might try the old fishing hole first. He didn’t know the way there himself as well as the others, only having gone the one time yesterday morning - _‘Wait, yesterday!? It’s only been one day?!?’_ He thought to himself. He had spent hours listening to the tales of the old days from the team, forgetting what time he was even in.  
The sloping, gravelly trail downhill from the base was a bit slippery to go down on pontoons, and Dusty would never admit to anyone how much he wanted to just slide the whole way down - but Maru would beat his aft if he tore up the metal, so he contained himself. Once he reached the treeline however, he had to rely only on what he remembered learning from following the Agustawestland through the woods.  
The trail in front of him most clearly visible went straight down to the Lodge. It was a long trail, but at least a clear cut one. About a quarter of the way down, however, it seemed to open up into a big meadow on one side, and on the other, between patches of brush, there was another, smaller trail, going deeper into the woods and getting thinner the further into it one ventured. This was the right way, he knew for sure, but the path eventually ended, or it seemed like it did, and from there he felt lost.  
Standing alone at the dead-end of the road, where it seemed to split off three ways, Dusty thought he heard...well, something. At first, it sounded like just another bird - it was long and drawn out, like a songbird trilling a tune. But out of it, he thought he could discern _words_...  
He ventured off to the far right trail, where the brambles were thickest but the sound was also clearest. An aircraft’s hearing was nowhere close to the acuteness of woodland creatures, but in time it wasn’t just his hearing that was leading him to the song’s source. As he came in between a stretch of burned Pines, he could feel a tug at his core - something entirely foreign, yet pleasantly familiar. It called from beyond the range of sound waves, yearning.

_‘I sing because I’m happy…_  
_I sing because I’m free…’_

The tones grew louder as he neared its source, his core pulling and tugging like an excited pup at the wheel of their parent. The birds - the real birds, mind you - began to join in its chorus.

_‘For his eye is on the sparrow…_  
_And I know He watches me…’_

And then he found it, everything at once - Windlifter, the lake, and the source of the song and his soul’s own pull…  
“You sing hymns?” Dusty asked. Windlifter seemed confused at first, until he noticed his eyes were not on him, but rather the small Hughes standing beside him.  
“It’s rare that he should be this far from Blade.” The green Sikorsky pointed out.  
“...I think he never found him.” Dusty ventured, “He was there with Blade when we found him, sure...but he didn’t stay.”  
“I noticed.” Windlifter answered. Before Dusty could ask him, he beat the younger plane to it, “What did you see?”  
“Well I..” Dusty wasn’t entirely sure if he was on the same page with the helicopter, but he went for it anyways, “I don’t know if it was him that caused it, but...I had a dream. Or a vision, or something like that I guess...I saw everything through Nick’s eyes. Like, I was _there_...”  
He told the older male about the fragment of memory he had seen, every detail he could remember from within his subconscious.  
“So...am I crazy?” He asked finally.  
“Well...you’ve always been that.” The Sikorsky teased, “But not in the way you’re thinking.”  
“Wow, thanks for the boot of confidence. Well...I mean, is it a _real_ memory? And what am I supposed to do with it if it is? Is it...is it connected to Blade’s situation somehow, is he trying to tell us something we don’t know--” The orange and white plane was shushed as the larger helicopter pressed his blunt nose against him gently.  
“Puzzle pieces.” He said.  
And suddenly, as if by magic, the crop duster got it.  
“Puzzle pi… _they’re puzzle pieces!_!!!” You’d think it was a revolutionary thought. “Oh my...he can’t _speak_ directly _to_ us because he can’t do more than be a shell of himself and a protector, so he uses his _own_ experiences to try to tell us things - or well, me things to tell you, to, I dunno, eventually tell the team maybe? I dunno, but that doesn’t matter yet, what matters right now is finding out _what_ he was trying to tell us!”  
Windlifter just sat back, watching the crop duster’s brain spinning like a top. He waited for him to finally calm down a bit before he dared to ask him, “Do you know what the memory means?”  
“Well, I mean it could be a lot of things. Was he trying to explain what he was like then to us, or how he might’ve met Blade - no, it couldn’t be that, this was before Blade’s time...so then how does that have anything to do with…”  
“I was hoping your answer would be a simple ‘I don’t know’.”  
“Well, I _don’t_ know...what _does_ it mean then?”  
“Exactly that.” The chopper answered, “It means we don’t know.”  
“...Huh?”  
“We may not have _all_ of the pieces yet.”  
Dusty looked down in front of the heli, staring ahead blankly at nothing.  
“I...was woken up suddenly, I didn’t get up on my own accord...maybe...maybe there _was_ more, and I didn’t have the chance to see it! Wait...why can only _I_ communicate with Nick like this? _You_ can see him too!”  
“Yes, well...I can only _see_ the deceased. I have no power to interact with them.”  
“But… _why?_ You’re _Windlifter_!” Dusty said - as though it served as a compelling argument.  
The green helicopter chuckled minutely, “And unlike you, I haven’t come face to face with Death. That day will come another time. But that greatly limits my power to anything beyond what I have learned already from others...my brother, mainly.”  
“You have a brother?”

“... _Had_...”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Guys guys guys you won’t believe this, I totally didn’t realize but I relooked at the whole series and in their present time, across 17 chapters it has only been ONE DAY. Holy fuck this has been a long-ass day! XD  
> -This is one of the lightest-feeling chapters I’ve had in a long time (haha light even as we end on Windlifter’s life burden and unfinished questions). It actually feels kind of nice to not always be torturing folks. Well, except now I’m kinda torturing Dusty’s mental capacity…


	18. Burdens and Bewilderments

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> IT’S HERE STORM  
> \-----

“Oh..” Dusty sank a bit on his pontoons. “What happened to him?”  
“...He met Death very young.” Windlifter said. His face fell dark, as it often did in times of emotional tension. Dusty had never even heard of his past, unlike the others in the team who’s backgrounds were known, even if they were only the little snippets of information they had. He’d known he worked as a lumberjack before he came here, but beyond that was blank.  
“Hinto was only a few years older than I; He was born prematurely, however, leaving most of his development stunted - and he could see things no one else could.”  
“Ghosts..” Dusty said for him.  
“Our father knew the meaning of his sightings, and explained it to us. I had only just begun to learn about them, and I could only make out faint changes in the air when a spirit was close. Hinto taught me most of what I know now.”  
“About the dreams?” Dusty asked. He nodded back.  
“But one day…” He continued, “he learned about a Vengeful Spirit in our circles. He got too close, became too involved...and it cost him his life. He was nineteen.”  
“Wow...that’s...I’m really sorry to hear that.”  
“It only serves as a reminder that one can only delve so deeply into matters beyond their control. In all things we must tread carefully, so as not to wander too deeply and become lost.”  
“‘Hinto’...what does that mean?” Dusty asked.  
“Blue. He had eyes like our mother, a stark contrast to the rest of our family’s dark browns.” He turned to look out across the pond, where little brim were picking off the water bugs from the surface. “I think you would’ve liked him. All of you would’ve.”  
“He’s not...well, he isn’t a spirit like Nick is here, is he?”  
“No. He never made any such life vows in his time on earth.”  
“Right...situational happenings. So, another spirit-related question...does Blade know? About Nick, I mean.”  
“No.” Windlifter said plainly, “And he doesn’t need to know. I’ve learned It’s better that he is unaware.”  
“What? But..why? Nick was his partner, and we all know he never really...grieved well over it… _ohh_ …”  
“To know about Nick now would kill him.” Windlifter said.  
“Right. That makes sense…secret it is then. So then I guess all that’s left...what do we do now?”  
“‘We’ can’t do anything but wait. But _you_...you can try to find the rest of our puzzle pieces.”  
“Right. Well I guess that can wait until later tonight, I don’t think I’ll be getting back to sleep anytime too soon. Should pay Blade a visit though…”

The base was quiet for now, the first quiet day they’d had in a long time it felt like. There was no news on the shooter that had run off, and no evidence proving he was even still in the park, so they had no choice but to stop the search. Progress with Blade’s recovery was slow, though finally Maru had managed to fix up the wound - it wasn’t very pretty, but hey, it was better than dead. And as Dusty neared the garage once more, he found the helicopter was finally awake...well sorta.  
“Oh, hey Crophopper, come grab a strap-” the forklift slash tug requested, as the plane rolled up to them, “Tempting fate but I only have so much leverage here..” He was, in fact, working on actually getting the Agustawestland back onto his tires, after having his front landing gear fixed and braced properly again. It wasn’t an easy task by any means, but now that he was repaired enough that he no longer held the risk of any more blood loss, he needed to get back to his standard horizontal position - before he started to have equilibrium problems.  
With the tug at one chain and the crop duster at the other, and locks over each pulley to hold their progress should they lose grip on it, the two were - eventually - able to pull the helicopter up just enough that his own weight being shifted again made up the difference. Blade’s right landing gear came down finally against solid pavement, and as soon as it did, he seemed to lower himself as much as he could to the floor - to keep from falling back over or losing balance, maybe, although Dusty had a sneaking suspicion it was a little more than that.  
He was technically awake, in that he was aware of his surroundings at least. But Maru, and now Dusty, seemed to notice he wasn’t really being...himself. Of course, he was still just readjusting to the now 40% of completely new hydraulic fluids, and that was a tiresome bodily readjustment in and of itself, but his entire demeanor just seemed _off_. He didn’t speak, barely moved, but flinched away harshly even as Maru, someone he’d known and cared about for literal decades now, had tried to come close. He relented of course, being reminded of that fact, but the tension and anxiety around him gave off an aura so intense you could reach out and touch it. Maru just stood silently by his side, close to his front where he could see him, a tine stroking quietly against his temple. Neither said a word. There was nothing that could be said that would be enough to calm his nerves right now.  
Dusty stood at the outside of the garage entrance, eyes shifting from the sunny landscape beyond the base back to their now rattled chief. He’d briefly debated going over there with them, re-reassuring to the helicopter that it was okay now, that he was safe, even if that didn’t involve words...but he decided against it. He didn’t feel like he deserved the kind of bond yet that the fire boss held with the rest of his team, those he’d worked with for so many years now and been through so many hurdles with. No matter how much he longed to be close to the red and white chopper, to be able to be that one, or one of those ones, that he could lean on in times of turmoil, he knew he hadn’t earned it yet. It had only been two years. Two insufferable years where he’d been forced to put up with him more than anything. He was closer now, but he wasn’t there yet. This would take time.  
But then the mechanic moved away again. He motioned for Dusty to stay where he was whilst he went to go get something out of the main hangar. As soon as he’d gone from the helicopter’s side, he could see the anxiety in his eyes triple.  
“Hey..” Dusty spoke softly, moving towards the now slightly trembling helicopter. Like hell if he wasn’t close enough to him yet, he wasn’t going to just sit here and alienate him when he was this shaken up. At least until Maru was back, which he expected he wouldn’t be long, he could do this for him. He could be something else to just focus on.  
He figured he would do something, or say something to him. He thought he might snap at him, like he always would, seeming to remind him he was strong and could carry his own weight, and that he should too. He actually _wanted_ that to happen, proof enough that he was okay.  
But he never did.  
Even as the crop duster stood beside him, wingtip just inches from his side, knowing his eyes were all over him, being so close...he did nothing. He didn’t flinch or protest, he didn’t brush it off, he didn’t make any indication of being okay.  
Then the unthinkable, the unpredictable; He leaned into the other’s side, confiding in the smaller aircraft’s warmth as his own relief. Dusty could actually feel the tremors rushing through his plating, the quick huffs of his breathing as his corebeat refused to relax. He took it upon himself to go a step further, hoping that he wouldn’t jump away, as his left wing slid underneath his belly, between his front and back landing gear, pressing the broad metal to his body and allowing their sides a much fuller contact.  
Until now, he’d never been this close to the helicopter. He’d never truly realized how much taller and how much stiffer he was by comparison. Never saw the hundreds of little specks and dents and scuffs and scratches that came with his life of firefighting, and the times before it. Or the odd sensation of his body heat, cold at first but searing and boiling underneath, and he couldn’t contain his desire to snuggle up into that warmth and share it with him. Blade didn’t seem to mind, actually relaxing against him somewhat as he did so.  
Things were far from back to normal, but for now this was as relaxed as they could get him. Maru hadn’t even bothered the two when he came back, seeing the helicopter finally calmer against the young plane. He guessed they were meant to hold each other up after all.

\-----

Blade dreamed a lot after the flight home, and being left for Maru to repair in the garage. He flitted in between sleep and the waking world, too tired to stay awake but too anxious to let himself fall under. The only thing that gave him the peace of mind to close his eyes was hearing the sounds of his team again - familiar engines and voices, common sounds of the base he’d grown fond of for just being consistent. At least he could know he was being looked after.

He woke again in the main hangar - an unusual place to be left to rest when he had his own, but maybe they didn’t feel like trying to get up that hill. It was the same as he had seen it last - crammed full of junk and dust bunnies, with just enough room for the team to surround the television every evening and absolutely _not_ binge his old CHoPs tapes. Where were the damn things anyways, they probably started hiding them after he’d caught them the first time…  
A low trilling of an engine grabbed his attention. It sounded weak and tired, pitiful, like the cry of a young pup for their parents or siblings. Looking around the space, he noticed a pile of blankets in the corner, shuddering like a leaf in a windstorm. He approached the colorful heap of fabric, grabbing a corner gently in his mouth and pulling it off.  
Dusty looked back at him with wide, pleading eyes. His paint was desaturated and murky, and not just from the dim lighting. As he instinctively moved in to bump the others nose, both respectively and calmingly, the younger male flinched back, trembling, eyes shut tight like he was in pain. _Pain…_ He’d caused him so much unintentional pain.  
Pulling more blankets off, he suddenly realized there was a real, _physical_ side of the pain he’d been inflicted with. There were small gouges along his sides and flanks, thin slivers and cuts across his belly, and within them were the orange flickers of live embers. His metal burned to the touch.  
It were as though he was burning from the inside out, the heat of his wounds rippling across his plating, slowly beginning to warp and reshape his form. His engine made weak, strained cries against the pain as it reached across him. Blade could hear the crackle of flames, embers hitting his hood like hail on a metal roof.  
_‘This was your fault…’_  
Blade pulled one of the blankets back over his front, hoping to snuff out the flame and deprive it of oxygen. He could hear Dusty beginning to sob over the agonizing sting in his body, and though they both did everything they could, it seemed there would be no end to the torment.  
“It...it feels _alive_...” He complained. The metal underneath darkened, paint boiling and bubbling under the fire, blistering across his sides.  
It were as though a demon had possessed his body, had inflicted his corpse with the flames of hell itself. And it stirred, the exact point of heat shifting from one side of his engine to the other, and from close under his prop to barely under his eyes, stinging and hissing terribly. Even as Blade began instinctively working out a system of alerting the crew quickly and assembling a way to diffuse the situation before him, he couldn’t take his mind away from the younger’s wracked sobs.  
From the corner of his eye, though every other glance he’d never seen it, the Agustawestland spotted a bucket - full of water, thank God. Without even giving it a second thought, he grabbed the handle in his jaws, and in one fell swoop poured it over the crop duster’s fiery frame. Heavy trails of steam hissed up from his body as the light left him, and while the fire was gone, every cut and warp of his painted metal fuselage remained. He fell against the older male limply, whimpering and mewling as the worst of the pain subsided, yet remained clung to him, unshakable.  
“I’m sorry…” The helicopter cried, tears hotter than the dying flames surging up,

“I’m sorry I couldn’t do more…”


	19. Close Your Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Title inspired by lyrics from Bastille’s “Pompeii”. originally titled "Here" and the _next_ chapter was called "Close Your Eyes", until I found a title that was even better...

When he’d woken up for real this time - and realized the weight of his nightmare in full - he was a shuddering mess. Even as the tug and the crop duster both brought his back onto his tires, fixed and physically recovered, he couldn’t shake the tremors of fear from his body. He was terrified, not just for himself anymore, but for Dusty.  
He knew Dusty was close, too. He knew he wanted to be closer, physically and socially. _He_ didn’t. Well...he knew the consequences and didn’t want to go through them again, more like.  
He’d watched the orange and white plane from the corner of his eye since he’d been brought back to an upright position, and once he could see straight again. He hung back by the doors, barely in his peripheral vision unless he turned his head. He didn’t want to, he couldn’t will himself to look at him. Maybe if he pretended he didn’t exist, he would go away somehow. He’d be free from this turmoil.  
Unbeknownst to him, Maru seemed to appear at his side, the heli jumping back a bit at his sudden touch. But it was okay, at least a little. He stood compliantly as the tug stroked his temple, in the hopes of reminding him of his safety. He’d known the forklift long enough, and seen him put up enough fights to know he would stay by his side through the thick of things.  
But then he left, as soon as he appeared, declaring he needed to go get something from the main hangar and that he’d be back in a moment. As soon as he couldn’t see him anymore, Blade’s nerves went back up to full alert.  
He’d almost let himself forget about Dusty, until he was ruefully reminded that he was still in the room. And as soon as he remembered, the damn plane started coming in on him. Fucking perfect.  
He wanted to tell him to go away. He _wanted_ to protect him - by making him keep his distance. But he couldn't find the strength to shoo him away again. He let the plane near him, let him slip his wing under his still roughly patched up underside. What could he do about it anyway, either to pretend he didn’t exist or to wait for the inevitable to happen to him, eventually. Both hurt him in ways he could no longer attempt to explain.  
He sighed, leaning tiredly, _exhaustedly_ , against the small plane’s body. Knowing he was here. Knowing now, just right now, he was alive. _He_ was okay. And he couldn’t bear to take that for granted again.  
“It’s okay…” He could hear him whisper, so quietly that he may as well have only been reading his lips - was he watching them?  
“It’s alright now...I’m here…”

_“I’m here, Blade.” Nick’s awkward hop towards him felt off-setting, but the thought didn’t linger as he continued, “Even when you think I’m not...I’m here for you. Don’t ever forget that, please.”_  
 _He wanted to run away and hide then. He wanted to hide his cuts and go back in time and pretend that the Hughes had never walked in on him, had never seen him like this, so empty, so lost… But he also didn’t want him to go. He didn’t want another to turn away from him and ignore him. He wanted someone to be close to him; Could he really call it selfishness for desiring such a normal, instinctual thing? He didn’t want to get into the other’s panels, despite his looks; he just wanted that bond, that thing that helicopters his age were _supposed_ to have, that friendship kindled by time and care and admiration. Someone strong enough to accept him the way he was - the way he **really** was._  
 _“I swear to you, Blade, I’m_ here _. I’ll do whatever it takes to stay by you. Even now…” The cuts across his sides were horrific looking, but they weren’t too deep. They were repairable. “Whatever it takes, I’ll stand by you.”_  
 _Words couldn’t describe the emotions that poured out of the Agustawestland that night._

As Dusty supported the helicopter’s side with his wing, he could feel the tension subside from him. Across his pointed muzzle, he spotted a glint of water trailing downwards over the metal, it’s origin from up under his eye. It was the only indication of crying that he gave. He didn’t know what to do or to say to address the situation, but he pressed into his side a little more, offering that reassurance.  
Blade was giving in. He knew it, and he couldn’t stop it. He knew they were headed for disaster, if not there already, and he knew if the crop duster turned racer turned firefighter went first, he would follow after. The team wouldn’t even stop him.  
But he missed this. He missed this so much, so much more than he ever realized, as he denied himself and accepted that the rest of his life was sealed on the path of solitude. He missed this even as thirty years flew by, and he’d grown cold and distant, under masks and shells he felt more a part of than anything now.  
He missed smiling. He missed laughing. He missed naivety and believing everything was okay, or that the world was his oyster and nothing could stop him - because he believed that once upon a time. Between challenges and anxieties, and failures and losses, he had believed that the world only waited for him. It wasn’t until his life, or rather the life he knew, was stripped away from him that he realized the world _wasn’t_ so perfect. But even in chaos, he discovered, there’s always a little sliver of good.  
And sometimes they came in the form of stubborn little orange planes.

\-----

By the time the two vehicles parted ways once more, the stars were already out. The group took to dinner eagerly, finally regaining their appetites once the worst was over once more. Between mouthfuls of food and sips of oil, the usual chats broke out between the team members - work and family and news and opinions, among the usual bickering between Smokejumpers. Maru left early, opting to get some work done before turning in, and Cabbie soon followed. After a while, everyone fizzled out to their respective hangars to hit the mats or just lounge until they were tired enough, and Blade went back to his own hangar to sleep for the night - or, well, try to.  
“Are you going back to lieutenant position now that the real chief’s back?” Dipper asked, once all who were left in the room were the big chopper, Dusty, and herself.  
“Not sure, I’ll have to ask.” Windlifter said, “After all that’s gone on, he may not be ready yet.”  
“Well, as long as we know who’s barking the orders tomorrow!” She jokes.

Once she, too, leaves the hangar, it’s only the two of them left. Windlifter doesn’t say anything as he goes out, but he gives Dusty that knowledgeable gaze - _‘I hope you’re ready to learn the rest of the truth tonight’_ he seems to convey to him. _‘I hope I’m ready to.’_ he wants to tell him.  
Dusty, being the last one left, turns off the lights and closes the mess hall doors for the night. As he headed to his own hangar - being a bit less empty and unfurnished than when he’d first come here to train - he saw a faint light glowing from out of one of the chief’s hangar windows. He was no doubt still up, though what he was doing was anyone’s guess. He hoped it wasn’t something bad. Though, after earlier, he didn’t think he would.  
It took ages for the young air tractor to fall asleep, to even think about falling asleep. Even with an overhead fan creating a subtle white noise and enough of a draft to have him snuggled up under blankets on his mat, sleep seemed farther away than Propwash Junction was. His mind was ramped with the thoughts of what may become of the rest of the story, what might actually be going on. He could only hope the ghost of someone’s past was enough to get some answers…

\-----

He’d have thought summer here would be a little less intense than Arizona. Turns out it was _worse_ , making up for it’s only 100-degree weather with enough of a mugginess to challenge the southern bayous. And in L.A. of all places. Although that may have been due to the influx of heavy rain and tropical storms on the coast.  
He wondered what Toni would have said about this place. He never thought after all they’d been through together that he’d be going into the big business alone - they only needed one guy to take the star role in a television series, and he fit nearly all of their criteria - small, fast, agile, and with the bonus that he did his own - entirely unique - stunts. The only thing they needed more of was actual experience, but even then he soared above their expectations.  
But Toni didn’t make the cut. Even as the Hughes pleaded that they give him some kind of role, they only seemed to have eyes for him on their casting list. He could only hope now that Toni was doing well in a studio of his own.  
He hoped he wasn’t the only newbie in the rest of their team, or at least that he wasn’t the only small-towner. He got along with the others all fine, though it was clear that yes, he was kind of singled out in the group. But then he met _him_... quiet, reserved, yet the star player of the series. He was like two completely different people between being on and off the stage; when the bell rang, he went from cool and confident to shy and avoidant. But he intrigued the Hughes to no end.  
Maybe it was his Agustawestland stock. Maybe it was his Bell streamlining. Maybe it was the deep cracks in his baritone voice. Or maybe it was just his eyes, like blazing blue flames trapped in frozen embers. And when they landed on him, they stayed there, holding their gaze like a hawk over their prey. It made chills run through his body - and not in a bad way.  
Between work and events, rehearsals and stunts, Nick watched the ice-eyed masterpiece, awestruck in the best ways from his being. He wasn’t just gorgeous to look at, he was incredible to listen to. In the rare moments where he would show his true colors, choosing socializing over social distancing, he was extremely intelligent, deep and philosophical. But they were rare gems of a moment to see him trying to connect with the team. Nick tried to steal every opportunity he could to chat with him, but they felt forced and purposefully casual. He didn’t seem interested in talking to him.  
But every time he went back to staying at a distance, he would always catch those eyes on him again. He didn’t want to communicate now, sure, but there was no doubt in his mind that he was curious. It wasn’t coincidence that every other glance, he was looking _at_ him rather than near him. He just wanted to find a way to acknowledge that curiosity without spooking him.  
Finally, he made a move to break the ice. It was late in the afternoon, going into evening, and the white and blue helicopter had silently snuck off to his own hangar. Nick decided to follow suit, seeing as how the lights were still on and he was most likely just rehearsing lines - maybe they could do some together, most of them were combined parts anyways. He tapped against the door with the tip of his skid, and waited. Silence. He knocked again, wondering if he hadn’t heard him. There was a metal clank from inside and some muffled swearing - he obviously _had_ heard him that time - but still there was no answer.  
Nick wasn’t one to wait on others all the time. When they didn’t make a move, he eventually just moved for them and made up the difference. That was the mindset he had when he decided to just push open the door to let himself in. What was the worst that could happen now?  
Well, he hadn’t expected what he found. Nor what would become of their friendship after that night. But from that point on, one thing was certain - if they jumped now, they jumped _together_.  
They had no idea of what futures would await them next.


	20. Post Mortem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: This is the price of truth.
> 
> Rated T
> 
> You get extra cookie points for every _Props to the Proppies_ reference in here. Enjoy!

The team got a new director, a few years and a couple seasons into the making of CHoPs. Though it was a welcome change, the passing of the torches between the old one leaving and the new one coming in made the whole ‘system’ in the lot much more stressful. Nick, in particular, was starting to feel that he was being worn thin.  
“You had a week and a half off for sick time, so there’s a lot to make up,” one of the script editors, Jason, told him, “Oh, and Theo wants to talk to you.” Theodore, better known as Theo, was the new director, and he seemed to have taken a new liking to Nick once he was back to his working routine.  
More than a liking, the Hughes thought, hopping off to wherever the head honcho was supposed to be. It seemed that since Nick had recovered from a recent flu and was back to being his old self, the guy had realized his apparent talent, and adored him above all others. Even Blade.  
Though to be fair, he and Blade never saw on equal terms. They didn’t fight, but you could see it in their eyes that they wanted to. Blade just never got to a point where there was enough heat to want to retaliate.  
“Nickie!” He heard from the room to his right, “Just who I wanted to see, come in kid, I got some news!” Let it not go unsaid that while the Buick was very “chop-chop” at work, he was also just as outgoing and friendly towards his crew - though maybe not the greatest listener.  
“Uh, hey Theo,” he said, “What’s up?”  
“Kid, I got big plans for this season,” he started, moving to close the door behind the helicopter. Nick folded his rotors up on instinct, feeling a bit claustrophobic in the room built more for terrestrial vehicles than aircraft.  
“I’ve been looking at the show’s ratings, and the reviews and what-not, yada yada, and I mean they’re, well they’re _good_ , first and foremost, but let’s just say there, oh, so so, they’re not as amazing as they _could_ be. Right?”  
“Yeah..”  
“Right, so you know as the ‘new guy’ here, yes I want to get to know all the folks here and learn your...can I say systems? They’re pretty chaotic systems, but hey, whatever works!” He took a minute to laugh at his own joke, before continuing, “But one thing I also want to do, as the new head of this company, this _family_ , I want to give it something new. Something different, something that can change the course of our viewer reception for the better.”  
“I get promoted finally?” Nick asked.  
“Well that’s a potential storyline too, but no, not the route I was thinking we’d take.” The silver trimmed Rivera sat back on his rear axles slightly, tone shifting from overly friendly to mildly serious. “Nick, I want to change around our main cast this season, give the audience someone new.”  
“You’re ditching me?” He blurted, confused.  
“No, _no_ , good heavens no kid, I’d be a fool to make you anything less than the main star! But your partner..”  
“Blade’s not going anywhere.”  
“I didn’t..say he had to go right away. But we may need to consider making the main crew size the same as it’s always been, just with someone else.”  
“Who the _hell_ do you want to take over Blade’s role then?”  
“I’m considering changing to a female secondary.”  
“Great,” Nick said, “so my current partner’s just gonna _magically become a bitch now_?”  
“I was thinking to smooth it out with a story arc, maybe there’s an accident, maybe something else could go down--”  
“Blade’s like, the most cautious guy _ever_ , on _and_ off the set. If anyone’s gonna be more likely to be injured, it’s me."  
“Look, I’m just trying to service the requests from our viewers,”  
“No, you’re not taking him off the casting! You’re not demoting him! Folks love him as much as they do me, and it’s not the same thing without him! Actually come to think of it, have you even brought this up to him yet? Does he _know_ about this yet?”  
“No let’s not go getting ahead of ourselves, kid!” Theodore placated, tires out defensively towards the stirred chopper, “everything is still just in concept, nothing is completely official yet!”  
“Well good, because I’m not letting you take him out of the casting. If _he_ leaves, then _I_ leave.” He had him there. He needed Nick, otherwise no one would even pick the series up again. He couldn’t afford to lose him.  
“...I’ll reconsider some things.” Theo said finally.  
“Good. And let me know when you come up with a better compromise.” Nick told him, before showing himself out.

It was a long day, made longer still by the fact that Nick never got a chance to tell Blade - in private - about Theo’s alleged plans to take him off the co-star role and replace him with a chick. The opportunity to do so never seemed to want to present itself. Every time he thought he could get a minute, someone else was tugging at his tail fins, or otherwise at his partner’s. Every other moment they had seemed to be shadowed by the director.  
The evening was no better. The crew was holding yet another season premiere party tonight, and while Nick would have loved to stay in his hangar, he was forced to attend.  
Worse still, around trying to find a free moment with Blade and avoid his vulture named Theodore, he was distracted by yet another face. She was definitely a looker, a well-polished ACS-100 Sora, with a white base, a turquoise belly and two golden, glittering stripes along her middle. But as Nick tried to ignore her, she seemed to pester him for his attention.  
She wasn’t just a fan, she was loaded, and she showed that off - if the gold-plated jewelry surrounding the edges of her landing gear were anything to go by. She was a visitor at all of their shows and live performances, but only now did she have the chance to meet the Hughes personally. He couldn’t blame her; it’s not every day that you get to meet your idols. But he was in no mood to be entertaining anyone tonight, and she certainly wasn’t catching onto that fact.  
And so he sat with her at the bar, hoping to catch a glimpse of the blue and white paint job of his partner among the party, but to no avail. The young aircraft - who had introduced herself as Gabriella - had gone spiraling off in a one-sided conversation with the helicopter, feeling materialistic and boastful in what fragments of sentences he actually processed.  
“-If things go well tomorrow, I might even find myself a position on the casting list with you.” Nick snapped back to reality. _‘She_ what _!?’_  
“Why’s that?” He asked - the first thing he’d said in about fifteen minutes.  
“Oh your new director and I spoke, a few days ago I think. Did you hear? He said he would go bring the idea up to you about changing around some current roles to make room for a new one!” Either Theo didn’t tell her he wanted to get rid of Blade, or she didn’t make the connection - or care.  
“He told me,” the chopper said, “but it’s still just an idea. Nothing’s set in stone.”  
“Well, not until my audition tomorrow it’s not!” She said, “He was very pleased to hear I would take up the position as the lead female role if I applied. But there’s others, too. Guess we’ll just see who gets the part!”  
The white and blue aircraft’s heart sank. Of course, Theo would only tell him about this _after_ he planned to find a reasonable candidate. That way there wouldn’t be enough time for his thoughts and opinions, and he must’ve assumed that regardless of those that he’d just go along with it. Well if he thought that, he’s got another thing coming.  
“Excuse me a minute...” He said, pushing off from the bar and leaving his untouched drink...well, untouched.  
He wasn’t even going to wait for tomorrow to happen, he needed to bring this up to Blade _now_. And tomorrow if he got word of being booted, then Nick would leave too. It wasn’t worth it to work without him, not after everything they’d promised to each other.  
Of course, no one else was aware of that claim. No one knew they were a thing. So much could ride on their careers if that got out, so they stayed hidden and discrete. They still saw others to keep it feeling neutral, but they knew at the end of it all they still wanted to be together. It was just a matter of waiting to be ready.  
He finally located the older male tucked into a corner of the building, enjoying his little-found moments of solitude between fans coming and going. He was alone for now, thank God, so Nick seized the opportunity.  
“Blade...I got news.” He said, pressing into the other’s side. It was clear from the look on his face that it was serious.  
“What’s up?” He asked, hints of concern in the outskirts of his tone.  
“Theo wants you out of the game now.” he said plainly.  
The other nodded against him slightly, “He always has. Since he got here we haven’t gotten along.”  
“But I mean he wants you _out_ , like for good. Tomorrow he’s set up auditions to replace you with some chick lead.”  
“... _What?_ ”  
“That’s kinda what I said.”  
“I knew you were the better actor but I didn’t think I was _that_ bad. Or maybe he just doesn’t like that we don’t see on the same terms.”  
“Whatever the reason...if they drop you I’m coming too.”  
“You don’t have to do that, Nick..”  
“Yes I _do!_ I would drop acting in a heartbeat for you, you should know that.”  
“But you don’t have to sacrifice this for me, it’s okay. We’ll still get by.”  
“But it’s not worth it anymore if I can’t do this _with_ you.”  
Blade’s brow furrowed, mouth in a tight crease. He couldn’t argue with him if that was his choice. He’s tried to in the past - the more you fight, the more fired up he gets.  
“We’ll see what happens tomorrow.” He concluded.  
“Guess so…” Nick said, pressing his cheek into the other’s tiredly.

Neither helicopter slept well that night. Part of that fact may have been that they used the current situation as an excuse to fuck ‘til dawn, but between all that they did find hour intervals to rest and recharge. Even then, Nick would toss and turn uncomfortably, and Blade wouldn’t sleep until he settled. It wasn’t a complete loss though - after all, he used that as an excuse to deliver some punishing blows later. The downside to that though was that Nick’s vocal cords were then too strained to work top-notch the next morning. Oh well, that’s why tea existed.  
As Nick had been informed, the auditions for a new female lead role were taking place in one of their main set buildings, but while that was going on there was still much to be done in the way of work. When he’d glanced over to see who was lining up, Gabriella was one of the first candidates. She looked confident, but she also had this scowl of rejection - probably from last night. And then their glances met - her brow furrowed ever moreso.  
“What made her turn on you so quickly?” Blade asked, seeing the exchange.  
“You know how I went back to her after our convo at the party last night to be nice?”  
“Yeah?”  
“She started hinting towards getting a room. She’s pissed because I turned her down, flat out told her I wasn’t interested. She just got all huffy and left.”  
“So that’s why you stormed back to the hangar with vengeance in your eyes...” Blade said.  
“Sorry to take that out on you..”  
“Should be, my tail boom still fucking _hurts_...”  
“Ehh you’ll live.” Nick replied with a sly grin, turning to leave.  
“Where’re you off to?”  
“Mandatory maintenance check. Gonna make you didn’t break anything.” He told him, voice low enough to hopefully not be overheard.  
“Don’t let Christer catch on!” Blade replied.

Christer Alstad had been the lead mechanic on the set since the beginning. Being originally native to Norway, he didn’t speak very good English to begin with, and Nick’s accent and ‘Spanglish’ only complicated matters, so he was mostly a silent worker. Nick appreciated that in the sense that he never brought up anything when he found teeth marks in his paint, among other injuries and afflictions. Maybe he knew, and maybe he didn’t. Regardless, he never told.  
He was a damn good mechanic too for what it was worth, and Nick couldn’t deny that. On top of that (and much to the Hughe’s annoyance) he also knew how to deal with wigglers. The secret to dealing with Nick particularly was to leave him elevated from the floor on his belly, leaving no easy escape - though that didn’t stop him from whining and complaining about being bored.  
While still in the garage waiting for his mechanic to be done (and trying not to fall asleep) the light cast onto his front was suddenly obstructed by the silhouette of his partner in the doorway.  
“Well it happened.” He said.  
“How long did he give you?” Nick asked, already knowing what he meant.  
“Uhh..about two weeks.”  
“ _Great_! Christer, you about done?” The forklift shrugged with his tines, closing the side panel of his flank and setting the bar back down.  
“What are you gonna do?” Blade asked, slightly worried.  
“Gonna give the boss a piece of my mind, and then we’re getting _out_ of here.”

\-----

Something didn’t feel right anymore. The memory started looking more like a dream - or a nightmare. Dark wisps of black smoke trailed around the edges of his vision, and when things happened, like when someone spoke, everything went hazy and white, and their voices were slurred and obstructed. The tale was unravelling.

_Stop!_

He could hear someone starting to shout. Could see glitching figures surrounding him, right in his face and then suddenly gone. Dusty tried to concentrate, tried to stay connected, but something was _very_ wrong.

_Get out of here!_

Not all of the memories were Nick’s anymore. Sometimes he saw things through Nick’s eyes, and other times he was looking at him head-on, taking on a truly ignited stare in a heated moment of verbal war. But soon enough even that would melt away into an abstract realm of colors and shapes, swirls and whirring noises and the perceived feeling of being watched.

_You shouldn’t be here!_

There was pain. Was it only within the dream? Was it in the waking world? It spread like wildfire into his fuselage - yes, Dusty’s own, having been removed from any concept of memory and remaining in his own paint again. It was like burning and drowning at the same time.

_Leave!_

He couldn’t see.

_Get out!_

He couldn’t breathe. If he could just…wake… _up_...

_**You’ve seen too much.**_

\-----

Something hadn’t been sitting right all night. It wasn’t like Windlifter, of all base members, to be the one unable to sleep. But around two in the morning, he rolled outside his hangar to sit and listen to the night.  
He sat alone outside the open doors to his hangar, watching breezes push the tops of the trees around, and hearing crickets chirp to one another. The only lights on in the base were the ones above the control tower, and the light in front of the main gate.

Maybe that’s why it surprised him to hear someone else up.

His first instinctual thoughts were either Blade having a nightmare, or Maru sleepwalking into something in the garage - if the loud metal clanking was anything to go by. But it sounded like it was coming from between the two buildings where both were, and no lights were flicked on, no doors open, no curses let out. Almost like it was coming from…

_‘No...not again…’_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Next chapter will first of all be a doozie, and second of all will not begin progress until after I get back. I’m going on vacay, be back about the 13th! [so if you send me questions they won't be answered until then. No internet where I'll be :P]
> 
> -This chapter tried to kill me. Like many others.


	21. Haunting Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> IT'S HERE PEOPLE!
> 
> Title inspired by Halsey’s “Haunting”
> 
> Forgive me for the longer wait than usual, I took a very sudden hiatus for my mental health recently and with life happenings and such I really had a lack of motivation to continue. But I’m gonna now, and dammit we’re going to finish what we started! Or what I started. Take a seat and buckle up because it’s about to get rocky! Again...
> 
> [Note: if this chapter comes off weird compared to the last one, that’s because of the break. And also I _really_ just want to fucking finish this.]
> 
> Rated T

Hinto had been an incredibly intelligent Sikorsky for his age. Windlifter knew as much just from the words he would speak - when he spoke at all - that he had a level of understanding beyond what the younger could comprehend. When they spent the days together in the forest, he would find himself asking his elder brother question upon question. Are there really ghosts and spirits? What do they look like? Can they speak? What do they say?  
But smart as he was, young Hinto was far too ill-prepared for his eventual fate. What he had known then, and what the world had known then about the supernatural were minimal at best. The only thing he had been certain of was that ghosts _did_ exist. Some of them were good; lost, but not evil, they simply desired protection of another, living being, or freedom from their curse after their love on earth had since moved on into the afterlife. But he was very unaware of the other side of the spiritual spectrum.

He had no idea of the capabilities of the wicked.

\-----

_Stop!_

He could hear someone starting to shout. Could see glitching figures surrounding him, right in his face and then suddenly gone. Dusty tried to concentrate, tried to stay connected, but something was _very_ wrong.

_Get out of here!_

Not all of the memories were Nick’s anymore. Sometimes he saw things through Nick’s eyes, and other times he was looking at him head-on, taking on a truly ignited stare in a heated moment of verbal war. But soon enough even that would melt away into an abstract realm of colors and shapes, swirls and whirring noises and the perceived feeling of being watched.

_You shouldn’t be here!_

There was pain. Was it only within the dream? Was it in the waking world? It spread like wildfire into his fuselage - yes, Dusty’s own, having been removed from any concept of memory and remaining in his own paint again. It was like burning and drowning at the same time.

_Leave!_

He couldn’t see.

_Get out!_

He couldn’t breathe. If he could just…wake… _up_...

_**You’ve seen too much.**_

“Dusty!!”

His body was wracked and tense, shuddering uncontrollably as he fought to right himself, to see again, to be back to his own reality. He might have been awake, and he might have been dreaming; it felt too horrifying to be real, yet too painfully concrete to be an abstraction of the mind. He felt at war for himself with a being that wasn’t his own.  
The hangar around him wobbled and spun, the floor feeling like a turn-table under his unsteady treads. And his _head_ , it felt like his canopy was about to split in half. What used to be yelling and shouting and whispers and threats were now a cacophony of shrieks ensnared in one another, the whole thing sending the air tractor into a blur of overloaded senses.  
He wanted to cry out for help, for a rescuer, but his throat was tight, and only seemed to grow tighter the longer the pain wore on. He stumbled to the floor, coughing and wheezing for air that he couldn’t quite grasp, his surroundings becoming desaturated and fuzzy. Something had caught a hold of him, a tightness wrapping around his entire fuselage, a live burning in his engine he couldn’t describe. He felt like he was being attacked by someone, like some live thing was choking him to death, and the world was starting to get greyer and darker...  
And then a figure appeared from the corner of his eye, rushed in in the midst of the chaos. A great shadow loomed over the plane, as tremors ripped through him and his paint began to pale. Words, waterlogged and in a native tongue he didn’t know, slowly broke through the swarming noises; He gasped, as air suddenly filled his lungs again, as his vision slowly began to return to him as the pain and the tightness around his body began to subside. He felt bruised and battered, dented and dinged, but he was alive and intact all the same. And definitely awake.  
As his vision came back to him, his eyes wandered up the body of the looming figure to find Windlifter standing over him, and his _eyes_...well, they said it all.

“I didn’t think they were a part of…” He started to say, “They...they were _here_...”  
“Wha-” Dusty tried to ask what he meant as he stood back up, before a snap in his landing gear sent him jarringly back down into the Sikorsky’s side. He leaned against him, waiting for the world to stop spinning again and for the acid to settle in his stomach.  
“What..” He tried again, panting between his words, “Just… _happened_?”  
Windlifter didn’t respond. He couldn’t see his face from where he stood, but he could feel the tenseness build up in his jaw. He reinvisioned his face when he first looked up to him, the way he stared in wide-eyed disbelief, but also in fear…

Like he’d seen this happen before.

“Where’s Nick?” He asked him then. He sounded on the verge of panic. Dusty didn’t know what he meant, until the memory of the floating ghost anchor fuzzily came back to him. He looked around from where he stood, as though he’d simply misplaced the semi-being.  
“I dunno..” He told him.  
Windlifter moved back and off of Dusty, who clumsily found his balance again on his three wheels, facing him with deeply ingrained worry lining his features. Dusty in turn looked concerned, but maybe not as much as he felt he should be - for all he knew, he just about died.

“He’s not back with Blade is he?”  
“..Maybe.” Windlifter said, but he could already tell his mind had wandered back off the subject to the matters in front of them.  
“What... what _did_ just happen?” Dusty pressed again. Windlifter surveyed the room like he was watching for predators around them, before deciding to finally answer. It was clear he didn’t want to, though.  
“I think..” he said, “this is a lot bigger than either of us think.”

\-----

Not all ghosts were entirely harmless. Some ghosts, particularly those dead-set (literally) to protecting something, were more physical in their means of protecting. A guardian’s ghost would lace themselves between the waking and the dreaming realms, not strong enough to withhold nightmares, but strong enough to keep them from sending a soul overboard. Strong enough to block the threats of a warrior.  
_Warriors_ were another story. They were wild cards, unpredictable forces in the spirit world, sometimes entirely peaceful, and other times holistically violent. That’s where the old ghost stories happened - moving objects, haunted places, things that went bump in the night.  
And some of the most dangerous went straight to the cores.

They didn’t know who they were dealing with. To this day, Windlifter never knew who Hinto was dealing with when he was attacked, when his body would be seized and overtaken in the middle of the night through a dream and into reality. It came to a point back in the day that they would start sleeping together, in the hopes that the younger could be an additional protective force against such demons when they emerged. To an extent, it worked - all it took was someone to shake the other out of their fight and to bring them back to central grounding that things seemed to stop.  
But then, the issue came of there being more than he could handle, and Windlifter’s concern of the situation that his brother wholeheartedly believed he had under control. Hinto started to fight with him, and started leaving to deal with everything on his own at night, despite his warnings. It was why not a week later, the family found he had died in his sleep.

That was what scared the Sikorsky about right now, more than anything else. Dusty didn’t even have the first clue what the situation meant, let alone how to resolve it, and _already_ some warrior was at his throat. He could only hold himself accountable for this, thinking that because he had “the chosen one’s special gift” he could bring peace to that side of the story. But now he was facing a greater obstacle, facing off with someone who clearly doesn’t want him here. He wished he could just forget he ever said anything about finding these pieces - it would have saved him falling into this incredible danger.  
And Nick could have only done so much. He’s a protector of another soul, and so he was tied only to Blade and not to Dusty - he wouldn’t have much of an effect on protecting the young SEAT. The only thing he could do was provide the fragments of the story they needed, and yet, at such an incredible cost now.

“I don’t wanna sleep..” Dusty said, waiting between morning maintenance in the work bay - and finding there were dents and scrapes he hadn’t had before all across his fuselage. The sun was just barely peeking over the treeline, and he’d been up now since before even Blade had gotten up.  
“I have some stuff that’ll knock you on your aft if you need a good night’s rest.” Maru told him. Dusty and Wind agreed to keep last night’s situation to just “having a bad nightmare” to avoid any unnecessary complications in the team. Blade especially, much as they both hated to do so, was left in the dark. But it felt to them like he was already catching on.  
He was doing a lot better today, still quiet and tired-looking as ever (but at this point, who _wasn’t_?) but noticeably trying to get back into the system. Windlifter agreed to take the lead for the next few days just so that he could recollect himself, and so that Maru can make sure the weld marks healed more smoothly so he could reattach the retardant tank - well, after fixing the places where the bolts had been ripped out. Currently, he was standing beside Windlifter outside of the repair bay, just checking that the air tractor was doing fine.  
It was a fun game now of triangles - Blade worrying about Dusty, Dusty worrying about Windlifter, and Windlifter worrying about both. Though for what it was worth, all of them were essentially in the same boat - bent and not broken, just waiting in the limbo for the next thing to happen. Whether good or bad, at least now they were all together with their team on the base, and had a means of protecting each other - day or night - in the case of any more ‘incidents’.

Whatever those may be.


	22. Sleepwalkers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I’m not dead, **I’m not dead!!!** I didn’t mean to leave this project sitting on my computer for almost three months. It just took the panic of oncoming NaNoWriMo to light the fire under my ass that got me to finish this hefty chapter. I had better get this damn series wrapped up and finished _by the end of **this month**!!!_
> 
> Chapter summary: _Demons are dicks and Dusty is doomed._

“You think they’ll go away on their own?” Dusty asked, leaning into Windlifter’s side. It had been hours now, and he was really starting to fight to just keep his eyes open. They had decided - for his own safety - to stay together overnight in the whirrlybird’s hangar. It was the only thing they could do right now as far as safety measures went.  
“I don’t know.” Windlifter told him honestly, “That depends on if Nick stops trying to tell the rest of his own story.”  
“You know, there’s a lot of stories I’ve gotten the last couple days that I haven’t - and don’t want - to hear the end of anymore...” Dusty said.  
Nick - or rather, as Dusty had started to call him, the Anchor - was, last they’d seen, near Blade again. Good thing too, since it seemed he had found him again, and was occupied keeping him safe. From what, they now knew the answer.

“Who do you think it is?” Dusty asked, “The thing that...you know...went after me, I guess.”  
“I’m not sure.” Windlifter told him, after a pause. “Perhaps someone from his past. Or from Blade’s.”  
“That producer guy, you think? I mean, he could’ve been it.”  
“In his position?”  
“Well... I mean look at Cad…” Windlifter made a chuff of his engines in response; painfully cringe-worthy memories indeed.  
“There’s also Gabriella,” Dusty continued, “She was...really pushy. Like, almost _Dipper_ pushy, just more...refined I guess? She could’ve been it, too.”  
“Didn’t you say you had a look back at Nick’s own childhood as well?”  
“Sort of. But just a glimpse of it. It was when he started performing the loops. There was his friend then, he might be...well, I don’t know. They’re _all_ kind of liable candidates…”  
Windlifter nodded, in a way that simply conveyed his agreeance to how convoluted the trail had become from here.

It was getting on for two in the morning now, almost exactly twenty-four hours from the incident with Dusty. Has it been that long already? Windlifter glanced down at his charge, and indeed, he looked the part. The poor kid’s sleep schedule was nonexistent at this point.  
“You’re going to have to sleep eventually.” He told him, watching the young plane teeter on his landing gear before snapping out of it and re-centering himself.  
“I can just...doze a little...here and there…” He argued, “Don’t need to get a full...night’s…”  
Actually, Windlifter was more concerned with his own sleep than with Dusty’s at the moment. While Blade was still taking time to readjust, he had the whole team to organize. Thank God the last few days were quiet and light, because otherwise he may not have even been able to stay up for Dusty’s sake.

Still, this could only go on for so long.

They both seemed to drift off around the same time, so neither could stop one another. Dusty plopped against Windlifter’s side, fuselage feeling so heavy he may as well have been falling through the ground. Sleep felt so comforting, welcoming him to the peace and quiet of the unconscious dark. It seemed to convey a promise of safety, so long as he lay in its clutches.

A perfectly vulnerable thing to be taken.

\- - - - -

Blade had some damn good hearing, of that not a soul could argue. Maybe it was just _how_ good his hearing was that caused him things like migraines so often. Still, he could easily hear the door of his hangar sliding open in the middle of the night while he was back in the extended second room, reading. He thought nothing of it at first - probably Maru coming in to tell him something, or bitch about something in the garage he couldn’t find or needed to get more of. Night-visits were common anyways, on account that neither slept well when there were looming skies. And the clouds outside _were_ building up thick, fog pooling up at the forest floor.  
But not a word came out once the doors were opened. It was like the presence of the intruder just dissipated. Curious, the war-painted Agustawestland turned to poke his front out of the doorway. All that registered in his mind was the orange and white body of his trainee, but before he could ask him what _he_ was doing up, and _here_ , at _this_ hour, the young plane’s eyes were shrunk down to near slits as he launched himself forward, jaws poised to _attack_.

_‘Clank!’_.

_‘THUD!’_

Blade hadn’t expected the onslaught, but his recently-added bout of PTSD reacted before his logic did, and went into high-gear the moment metal collided together. Neither one was aware of each other’s reasons or intentions; it was just an out-and-out ground fight. It was all Blade could do to protect himself against the plane gone feral.  
Dusty was tiny compared to Blade, but he was a damn slippery little fuck, and he could dodge and duck around the copter’s jaws with considerable ease, going to his back side to reach for his tail boom. His wings left Blade with tetters of anxiety, as they kept brushing against his belly across the recently welded, still tender scars. He sure was making a damn good effort to sink his teeth down into the edge of his tail.  
But Blade never let that happen. Before teeth could become embedded in the sheet metal, the red and white helicopter all but body-slammed the younger male into the wall opposing him. His wing was forced down and crushed into the corner where the wall met the floor, the other going up into the air and exposing the plane’s white underbelly. A dark, guttural sound escaped the smaller aircraft, something no one had heard before, and in his fading daze of energy, Blade seemed to realize:  
 _this_ wasn’t Dusty at all.

\- - - - -

Maru had arguably the oddest sleeping schedule of them all - and that was saying something. Some days he wouldn’t roll out of the shop until six or seven, others he was tinkering in the garage before the sun had even begun to bleed into the horizon. He was always up the same way, just never the same time. It was mere coincidence that he was up around the same time the next shenanigan took place.  
It sounded the same as before, when Windlifter had caught it - the rattling and banging and ear-wrenched scraping of metal. But it didn’t come from Windlifter’s hangar, or from Dusty’s - it came from _Blade’s_. And it was _loud_ as hell, sending shivers through the tug’s frame at the shrillness of it.  
He left his work behind him, rushing out to go get involved in the event. The door was cracked open as the mechanic made his way to it. He figured something fell, or Blade was just having a panic attack, or both. What he found was probably the _least_ likely thing he could have predicted.

He came in to find Blade and Dusty, standing mid-tussle in the center of the room. The young plane’s growl felt foreign and unnatural, and Blade - half-awake, mind you - used his size more than anything else to crush the aircraft under him, keeping him from getting up at his sides with his canines - yes, the orange and white plane’s teeth were _bared_.

“What the _FUCK_ is going on?!?” The mechanic yelled, startling them out of their fight. Both plane and helicopter stopped for a moment to acknowledge him, before the younger started thrashing and struggling again underneath the older male. Thinking he was trying to get at him again, Blade pushed back down over the junction of his wing closest to his landing gear, using his leverage to push him down further, until the unceremonious _‘SNAP!’_ of a part in his left landing gear. He pressed down, that is, until the plane's entire demeanor seemed to suddenly shift.

“--ow, _Oww_ fu-hh, Bl- _ade_ , what the fuck-- _OW_!! Stop, stop _stooop!!!_ ” All tension ebbed away from the orange and white aircraft’s frame as he crumpled into the floor under Blade, his fight instantly gone as he came back to reality. As Maru pushed himself in between them, Blade finally came off the other’s now bent-in wing, watching in utter confusion and horror as the scene finally unfolded in front of him.  
Dusty looked dazed, scared even, like he had no idea what just happened, nor how and why. _He_ was the one who came in and first attacked, as Blade recollected, yet when confronted about it his brain felt fuzzy and forgetful. He did... _what_!?

“I was...I was with Windlifter!” He said, “I was staying up with him, but I was just fighting sleep and...and the next thing I know I’m...I’m here? How did, when did I…!?” He started to look more bewildered than they did, his fuselage shuddering with anxiety.

“Look, I don’t know _what_ the hell is up around here,” Maru stated, with a stressed sigh, “frankly I’m up to the point I don’t _give a damn_ , either! The full moon’s got all of y’all acting like fucking savanges! But whatever’s going on here, it needs to _fuck off_!” Though both others agreed, his words were hollow and meaningless as they both followed him back to the garage. Dusty especially was going to need some serious repairs made to his wing.  
Windlifter showed up to meet them there, and though his face looked like he had a lot to say - glancing wearily between Dusty and Blade and their various array of new wounds - he didn’t let so much as a word slip. Dusty didn’t either, as much as he wanted to. By now, he was too confused, too tired, and in too much pain to argue.  
Later, when Windlifter did finally ask him, Dusty shrugged and responded with “It’s like I went sleepwalking. But...sleep- _attacking_ instead…”

He opted to sleep with the doors locked and chocks against his tires after that incident.


	23. The Forest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Title inspired by twenty one pilot’s “Forest”
> 
> Shorter chapter because I’m tired, and I want to just… _out_ , I’m getting a chapter out. I wanted something else out now that I've ended the first set of _Props to the Proppies_ for the year.

More incidents happened after that night, though. Dusty would try his damndest to stay awake in his own hangar overnight, would end up crashing eventually, and then would wake up somewhere that _wasn’t_ in his own hangar, with no prior recollection of getting there. Most of the time, he ended up in or around Blade’s hangar. Sometimes he woke up right under Blade’s tread, in pain and with the vague taste of hydraulic fluid in his mouth, and other times he just woke up outside and in pain. Windlifter tried to do what he could, but he could never seem to catch the crop duster leaving the hangar. And Dusty, of course, couldn’t catch himself.

But one night in particular, as they’d dreaded to expect, would prove to be one step too far.

The rest of the team, through whatever means they had, learned about Dusty’s new ‘sleepwalking problem’. Or at least, the surface level of it. Dusty and Windlifter both were dangling on the thin wire of dodging the real reason this was happening, because at this point, they didn’t need a sleep aid - they needed an _exorcist_.

It sickened the young plane, the thought that he was actually being, well to put it bluntly, _possessed_ , just used as a pawn to continue targeting Blade - as if last week wasn’t hell enough for him. But it did make him wonder if there was something connecting his supernatural assailant to Blade’s. They were both after the same thing, arguably, were affecting them around the same time, and seemed hell-bent on letting nothing stop them from tearing the red and white chopper apart. It _couldn’t_ just be a coincidence. It never was anymore.

The weather outside was getting darker and gloomier with every passing day. Fog was getting heavy in the Piston Peak forest, and a lot of the hiking trails were being closed due to the lack of visibility. Rain came and went, but thankfully there was no flooding or situations started from lightning bolts hitting trees. The team right now was at minimal work, and it was becoming as frustrating as it was boring.

“I hate saying this,” Cabbie stated around the mess hall, “but something terrible better happen soon, or the Smokejumpers are gonna lose it..” He gave a weary glance down to two of them, Drip and Blackout, who were currently trying to make a tower out of empty oil cans on the table. A few team members nodded their agreements, but Blade and Windlifter remained silent. Dusty, snuggled between them, was finally giving up, sleeping nose-first into the table, with the comforting knowledge that he had the entire attack team to keep watch over him.

“At least I have a nice project to work on today,” Maru said, “Blade, your cuts should be healed up enough I can clean up the welds and put that tank back on. I managed to find replacement bolts and fixed the mounts on it yesterday.”

“Oh joy.” Was his gravelly response. Things were at least going back into ‘manageable’ levels again, although it looked like he’d added another few layers of emotionless exteriors to combat the new stresses of having Dusty roaming the base unsupervised at night.

Dusty stirred minutely between the two helicopters, though only to readjust his frame before settling back down against them. You could feel the plane's exhaustion in the _air_ it was so heavy.

Blade shifted to peel himself from the racer's body - doing so as quietly as possible - to follow Maru back to the garage. He'd come back to switch places with Windlifter again in a bit.

Dipper had been offering to watch the poor plane too, practically begging the fire chief to let her help them out, but the offer was declined. Even Cabbie, easily ranked as their most dependable "babysitter" on the team, wasn't permitted to watch over the sleepwalker. Both choppers had their own reasons for why they were the only ones who could do this, but they excused those with the same argument - "He's our responsibility”, and “we need every able _plane_ we have now."

It was a weak argument at best. It only stuck until the inevitable day that _both_ choppers - and Dipper - were being called in to respond to a water rescue in the park. They shared a weary glance the moment they knew they wouldn’t be able to tag-team on Dusty, and agreed in silence to leave him instead in Maru's company.

The air tractor - only just barely awake now - squinted up into the sky as the three figures left, silhouettes disappearing in the heavy fog. He'd have gone too if he wasn't still having problems with his aileron. Blade did a number on his wing that one night, and while the majority was fixed, that one flap was still being too buggy for him to be cleared to fly.

And that's what Maru set to taking care of next, once the three left. Taking a couple tools down from the high places in the shop, he pushed Dusty to the middle of the room to start hacking into that wing and fiddling with wires. Dusty fought to stay awake through it, made harder from the foggy atmosphere that was too bright to look up at directly.

He was always startled awake again, after dozing off into brain-fog, when Maru yanked out a rather sensitively-bound wire connection.

"Ahg!"

" _I'm sorry!_ "

"sss...No you're _not!_ " Dusty winced, hissing through clenched teeth.

"...That's fair." Maru admitted, as he started digging into another wire connector. Hey, he was running out of team members to crack on; Windlifter and Blade were too stressed, Cabbie was too fed up with his ‘children’ wreaking havoc on base (of which Maru was _not_ about to direct toward his shop), Dipper wasn’t around half the time, spending her days in her hangar on fandom sites, Patch was keeping a _very_ careful eye on the park as it were, and Dusty was just...always asleep.

\-----

By the time the three of them returned, the sky was dark again, but foggy as all hell. You could barely see two feet in front of you anymore. It was a good thing they'd all landed safely _before_ the heaviest of it rolled in, or else they might've been in trouble.

Maru only just finished putting things back up for the night when he was met with two defiant stares at the hangar doors. Yeesh, the two were starting to act like married _helicopter parents_.

"I sent him off to bed already-"

"How long ago?" Windlifter asked, as Blade was already turning to check.

"Chrysler, ten minutes ago! He ain't a damn toddler, he's-"

"Dealing with a sleepwalking problem, and we're trying to keep him out of harm's way."

"Then I'm putting in motion sensors if this keeps up, y'all act like he needs to be watched every second of the day!"

The Sikorsky's gaze dropped down; he knew it was a lot, they were really pushing it, but Dusty was in potential crisis right now, and he didn't dare overlook a single detail this time. Hinto was one soul too many for him to see get taken. Though even he didn’t remember having _this_ much of a problem.

He was about to roll off after the fire chief, when he all but collided with his nose in the heavy fog.

_“He’s not in his hangar.”_ Blade breathed, on the verge of panic already.

“He can _not_ have gone off _this_ soon!” Maru said. Of course, the two helis only ignored him.

“I’ll check my hangar,-”

“As will I.”

“If he’s not at either of those places we might as well try to scour the...base...” Though, as Blade started glancing around, it became clear that would be as easy as finding a needle in a haystack; the fog was impenetrably thick, heavy and low to the ground. Even fog lights could only clear through so much.

“I’ll let Patch know that he’s loose again to alert the base.” Maru huffed, rolling past the two in mild frustration. He had every right to be, anyways.

Once the tug disappeared in the haze of white swirls, Blade’s anxiety only seemed to increase tenfold. Windlifter moved purely out of instinct to try and comfort him, but he turned away abruptly, trembling on his landing gear.

“I...I got a _bad_ fucking feeling…” he said, “He’s...he’s not safe… _he’s not okay_.”

Windlifter set his expression across from the Agustawestland, his rotors already starting to slowly spool to life.

_“Where?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this makes enough sense to not sound stupid. XD


End file.
